I can assume if you're reading this that you were able to survive Black Friday.  Billed as the busiest shopping day of the year, the Friday after Thanksgiving (or Black Friday) is no longer the only mass-shopping day of the year anymore.  Thanks to online merchants, the first Monday after Thanksgiving, called Cyber Monday, is the busiest online shopping day of the year for most.

Hey… guess what?  Today is Cyber Monday.

The Official Google Blog wants to remind everyone shopping online to stay safe and secure while buying up all of those holiday gifts.  And since, according to Google, a lot of folks will be shopping from work, don't forget to do your job.  This would be a horrible time of year to get fired for shopping online.

If you decide to risk your job to shop online, you might want to check out the list of Google Checkout participants.  As the blog post mentions, several new online stores have been added just recently to the thousands of existing Google Checkout users.  Using a single, unified checkout service helps customers keep their financial data secure.  It's got a pretty cool tracking feature, too.

Google Checkout also lets you shirk a big chunk of the checkout work onto Google.  If you sell products on your site, it might not be a bad idea to look into Google Checkout.

Why not let Google do some of the dirty work for you?