Stuck for what Christmas presents to buy? Maybe you need the collective intelligence of a few thousand other shoppers to advise you. With Christmas online sales predicted to rise a fifth over last year, a new swath of recommendation services is fighting to be the consumer’s first port of call. With names such as Crowdstorm, Kaboodle, StyleHive and Whatsbuzzing, these internet businesses claim to measure the buzz around products and aggregate personal recommendations to tip you off about what is hot. So many of these firms have sprung up recently that, come January, savvy investors might be picking up two for one in the sales.

The trend is called social shopping, and it relies on similar social-networking technologies that have enabled YouTube to automate its selection of must-see videos and MySpace to determine who at any moment is cool. The sites typically let members “tag” products they like, grab images and information from the web and display it all in one place, and then humanise the data by organising it into themed shopping lists for kids’ toys or executive gadgets. There is currently much talk of “the wisdom of crowds” as a means of predicting what will become popular. Well, think of social shopping as an attempt to tap the wisdom of the mass consumer and quantify the results as digital word of mouth.

ThisNext, for instance, lets its users recommend products and create  collaborative shopping lists called “shopcasts”. Attracting buzz at ThisNext are customised school lunchboxes from Ogg Studio, which feature your child’s photograph (“I gotta get one of these for my husband with a big picture of my face on it!,” says one tipster), and cutesy plush dolls known as Wee Ninjas (“this little guy watches out for you!,” approves another). Crowd power does seem persuasive: sales of Wee Ninjas have quadrupled since social-shopping sites began tipping them, say their makers, struggling to meet demand.

The sites hope to make their fortunes from a mixture of advertising and affiliate fees from retailers, as they do not sell products directly. That is because they claim to be simply “tastemakers” that neutrally seek to guide shoppers. One, WhatsBuzzing, calls itself “the online equivalent of window shopping in a mall or browsing your Sunday newspaper’s shopping section. As a consumer, there is too much information coming at you and often it is the wrong kind. Whatsbuzzing allows consumers to tag the incoming buzz items with descriptive words that other consumers may find useful, eg spring fashions, organic make-up.” Another, Kaboodle, offers lists designed to help travellers plan trips to Alaska or Walla Walla – as well as Christmas wishlists from users such as kristi7 from Chicago, who, according to her Kaboodle profile, has 159 friends on the site, and is hoping Santa brings her some thigh-high socks from American Apparel.

Will these sites change the way we shop? The jury is out. “Shopping tends to be a social experience in the offline world,” says Jupiter Research analyst, Patti Freeman Evans. “On the internet, if you have five friends, you might also have five million friends. Whether these sites have a huge impact on retailers remains to be seen.” Still, if Santa is short of ideas, he ought to know that the Nokia Digital Pen and the latest KitchenAid mixer are currently very big on buzz. Just in case readers were wondering what to buy me.