The JibJab.com guys are at it a gain – now they have released ‘Grumpy Santa’, another of their Flash-based animations. Instead of skewering the American political process, they highlight Santa’s tough times. Striking a deal with Yahoo.com, JibJab has made this into more of an industry – including a book, premium downloads, etc. – but for balance, do promote a program to give toys to childeren in Iraq. Click here to see the movie.

In an unprecendented effort for an open-source project, Mozilla.org placed a two-page advocacy ad in the New York Times on Thursday, December 16th. I have been using Firefox for at least six months now, and find that it behaves much more reliably for me on the Mac – other browsers seem to be crushed by various Flash animations. Link to a full-size image and the press release here.

CNNfn, the Financial News Network and sister to CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN espanol and CNN International, is signing off at 2pm ET today. The network suffered from the same issues that doomed CNN/SI, my old employer – the turn around in how distributors paid for programming, and the slower-than-expected rollout of digital capacity to take on niche networks like this. CNNMoney.com will, however, continue to publish online. Managing editor Allen Wastler has this retrospective. But Myron Kandell summed it up best as he signed off on behalf of all the staff — ‘It was just one of those things.”

Those wacky folks at the ad agency Porter + Bogusky (creators of Burger King’s Subservient Chicken) have a new campaign, this time for Method Soap. This site features a confessional of sorts, and users can view others confessions. User-submitted confessions can also be streamed to a downloadable screen saver. Nice stuff, and awfully quirky – but in a good way. Visit the site.