Posting will be light between now and Tuesday as we’ll be observing Monday’s King Day of Service in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who would have turned 80 yesterday.

If you’d like to do some volunteering to mark the occasion, or if you’re hosting a service event and need volunteers, President-elect Obama has provided a handy-dandy database of service opportunities at the recently launched USAservice.org. The database is searchable by location and date, and includes events this weekend as well as ones on Monday. And MLKday.gov is hosting a similar database as well, although you have to do a little digging to find the advanced search option that lets you refine your query by zip code, interest, and so forth.

So have a great long weekend, however you spend it. We’ll be up to our usual tricks starting Tuesday morning.

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Seattle-based Amazon announced its sales for the 2008 holiday season were its best ever, peaking with 6.3 million items ordered worldwide on December 15. Best-selling items included the “Wall-E” DVD, Nintendo Wii video-game platform, Microsoft Office software, and, of course, the Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

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Another year is coming to an end, and for us at Xconomy it has been an action-packed 12 months. Not only has our flagship Boston site grown beyond our expectations, we have also launched Xconomy Seattle and Xconomy San Diego, building our own small, but rapidly growing, network. We’d like to take this occasion to thank all of our readers, underwriters, venture members, partners, and event sponsors for your support, as you have helped make this an incredible year.

Now, we’re taking a slight break. Posting will be light through the new year, although we’ve got a few fun things planned next week for your holiday reading pleasure. And we’ll be back at full throttle starting on January 5th to bring you all the innovation news—up close and personal—as it’s happening.

So thank you for a fantastic year, and Happy Holidays!

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In the shopping spirit of the season, I thought it might be useful to give a quick update on what the year’s best-selling tech gadgets have been on Amazon.com, and how Amazon’s own foray into gadgets is going. Probably too late to help with your own shopping list, but nevertheless here are a couple notable items from the blogosphere:

—Forget Blu-ray players and iPhones. Wired’s blog notes that four of the top 10 best-selling electronic gadgets on Amazon this year are GPS devices from Garmin. That includes the #1 item of 2008, the Garmin nüvi 350 GPS navigator. Who needs maps anymore? (OK, I do.)

—Amazon’s own gadget, the Kindle e-book reader, is apparently sold out for Christmas, and its stock as a search term on Google spiked in October to nearly triple its level during the summer, according to TechCrunch. Google searches for the term “Kindle” have since fallen off somewhat, but remain high. The Kindle faces competition from Apple and Sony, and it will be very interesting to see what all this means for the future of books.

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Maybe it’s because everyone is trying to get their deals announced before the holidays, but it was a busy week in the Northwest, with plenty of activity in mobile software, online media, and medical devices.

—Bellevue, WA-based BlueKai, an Internet marketing firm, raised $10.5 million in Series B funding, led by Waltham, MA-based Battery Ventures. Existing investor Redpoint Ventures also contributed to the round. BlueKai is creating a marketplace for online consumer data.

—Luke reported that Seattle-based Uptake Medical, a maker of medical devices, raised $3 million to carry out a pair of clinical trials for a technique to treat emphysema and other deadly lung-obstructing diseases. The capital was raised from all of Uptake’s previous investors, including Prism VentureWorks, Onset Ventures, and WRF Capital.

—Seattle-based mobile startup Zumobi teamed up with outdoor retailer REI to release a free software application, called the REI Snow Report, for getting instant …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Melodeo, a digital-music startup, is powering the Salvation Army’s holiday music iPhone application, which was announced yesterday. The software, available from the iPhone Application Store for $2.99, streams a selection of holiday tunes to your phone, with unlimited listening. Proceeds will benefit the Salvation Army charity.

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It’s a holiday for us here at Xconomy, as we join banks, schools, state and federal offices, and the rest of the nation in commemorating those who’ve served in the military. We’ll be back on Wednesday with a new bundle of stories.

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