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Hold onto your sleigh-reins: Santa has gone interactive.

In either a blatant manipulation of a beloved Christmas legend or a genius attempt to bring children and parents together this festive season, one of the world's largest instant-messaging operators has taken last year's 'e-mail Santa' campaign to another level.

MSN has established a live website where people can read Santa's blog, download games and recipes, and even chat live with the big man himself.

According to Santa's chief technology officer Elfred Elveson, who slipped away from the North Pole for a quick visit to Toronto this week, the site is performing even better than expected.

"We don't look at it as marketing. It's a great way to keep believing in Santa," said the elf.

"We thought it would be a really fun way for Santa to get in touch with kids [so] we decided we'd give Santa a push in the right direction. He's getting very good at typing."

In the 10 days that people could e-mail Santa last year, the inbox was flooded with more than 38,000 missives.

Since Santa's MSN Hotmail site went up on Nov. 20 this year, it has already had 89,000 page views to check out his blog, chat live with Santa and access other features of the site.

MSN Canada marketing director Jodi Kasten said the campaign was designed to both promote festive goodwill with children and also give families a way to explore the world of Instant Messaging and beyond.

"We know families with young children are a very high demographic for us. Parents want to start a relationship with their children early by doing things online together," Ms. Kasten said.

"Children and their parents can learn about blogging. For some it may be a new world. It also is a program that allows parents to be interactive."

That bid to nudge people into the instant messaging world may not be misplaced.

A recent Associated Press-AOL survey found a burgeoning instant-messaging gulf is growing between teens and adults.

Almost half of teens — 48 per cent of those ages 13 to 18 — use instant messaging, according to the poll. That's more than twice the percentage of adults who use it.

Of the adults that do use IM, three quarters of them still prefer to use e-mail. That is reversed for teens, who prefer instant messaging by the same ratio.

More than half of the teens using instant messaging send over 25 a day, and a fifth of them send more than 100 messages a day. Three-quarters of adults send few than 25 instant messages a day.

And teens were twice as likely to say they can't imagine life without instant messaging. In fact, it is so much a part of their lives that a fifth of IM teens have asked or accepted dates via instant messaging, and 16 per cent have used it to break up with someone.

But some things are still better said in person. When sharing serious or confidential news, both teens and adults prefer to use the telephone, the poll said.

So just how does the big man from the pole prepare all of those toys and gifts, plus be on hand to personally reply to every letter, and chat online?

Simple, says his top elf. He just does. "That's why he's Santa."

People wanting to link up with the big man in red can check out Santa's blog and add Santa's address — northpole@live.com — to MSN messenger friends.

The AP-AOL survey of 1,013 adults and 500 teens was conducted online by Knowledge Networks from Nov. 30 to Dec. 4. The margin of sampling error for the adults was plus or minus 4 percentage points, 5.5 points for teens.

Technology for instant messaging has been available to the general public for about a decade. Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN are the major IM operators.

With a report from Associated Press