2012 is upon us, and so is an annual rush to join online dating sites in the new year.

It's known as the Holiday Effect - the 15 to 20 percent increase in online daters from December to February. Every year online dating sites experience a surge in membership over the holiday season, as singles who didn't have someone to kiss under the mistletoe or at midnight on New Year's Eve turn to the Internet for a fresh start in the new year.

There are a number of reasons that January has become such a busy month for online dating. New Years resolutions are on everyone's mind, focusing many people's attention on improving their current relationships or finding a partner if they're single. The idea of making a fresh start for the new year is also a strong motivator that draws traffic to online dating sites, as is the pressure from family and friends to settle down that singles often experience during the holidays.

"There is also the anticipated Valentines Day event which many single people dread more than any other day of the year," says Penny Russell, a spokesperson for a single parent dating site, "and this often spurs them into action and a determination to seek out a new partner before that day arrives."

Doree Lewak, author of The Panic Years: A Guide to Surviving Smug Married Friends, Bad Taffeta and Life on the Wrong Side of 25 Without a Ring, believes that the pressure to be attached during this time of year is especially strong on women. "Women still feel huge pressure around the holidays," she told USA Today, "and certainly exacerbated by New Year's - to have a date. I don't think that moment has passed."

Dating sites all across the Web experience the Holiday Effect from both men and women, from Match.com who say that their busiest season is December 26 to February 14, to PlentyOfFish.com who report a 15% spike in sign ups and a 20% increase in activity from current users during that period.

And it's not just the dating sites themselves that benefit from the Holiday Effect. As more and more members join the sites, the pool of potential dates increases dramatically, improving everyone's chance of finding love in the new year. Many dating sites respond to this trend by offering special rates around the holiday season, so if you're in the market for a membership take advantage of their holiday gift and start the new year off right.

If you are interested in finding a service to join this year, you should take a look at our list of reviewed dating sites or try our dating site search tool.

We have had a number or requests over the last year for our recommendation on the best online service to use to perform background checks. These requests come from people who have met someone on a dating site and are just looking for that extra bit of security to ensure the person they are dating is who they say they are.

There are a number of companies out there that offer this type of service. Over the next few months we will review a number of them and add the ones we feel offer the best service to our new Background Checks category.

Most background check services allow you to find information on an individual including contact and address information, military records, criminal records, and other court documents like marriage records. Remember though no service can offer 100% accuracy. Please read our Background Checks page for more information on this.

The first service we have added to the new category is a review for PeopleFinders.com.

eHarmony is having a free communication event this weekend which starts Friday, December 30th and ends on Monday January 2nd at 11:59pm. It has been a while since their last event so those of you interested in giving eHarmony a try, now is the time to do so. With the recent holidays and the New Year being celebrated on Sunday you can expect dating services like eHarmony to be extra busy; which means more singles to meet online.

For those of you who have not heard of eHarmony's free communication weekends (FCW), they allow new and existing members to communicate for free. Remember it is also free to create a profile as well so there is no cost or credit card required to enjoy this event. The only features not included during this promotion are photos, Secure Call (a phone service) and skipping to email in the guided communication process.

The last FCW happened during Labour Day in September (see Story). From our count this will be eHarmony's 36th free communication event.

To find out more about this online dating site you can take a look at our eHarmony review.

So how many people visit Plenty of Fish (or POF as now the dating service likes to be called) in a month? Unfortunately they did not release that number but they did share some other related statistics which may help us figure it out. In November of this year the dating site had 6 billion page views and over 32 billion images served. According to Alexa, in the last 3 months the average page view per user was about 30. So this would mean that Plenty of Fish had about 200 million visits in the month of November (6 billion / 30) (this includes repeat visitors). Now Alexa.com statistics are not always exact but at least this gives you a rough idea.

We also found out that instant messaging on POF produced almost 30 billion page views. All of this traffic (including the actual dating site) is run off of just 11 web servers in which it is estimated 6 are only needed. So, what is the total cost to run the web services for POF? Well, according to the Plenty of fish blog it is just shy of $70 thousand Canadian a month.

To find out information about the dating site please read our review of Plenty of Fish

With over 5 million registered members, Christian Mingle has become the largest and fastest-growing online community for love-seeking Christian singles.

"Gone are the days when online dating was considered taboo - even in the Christian community," says Ashley Reccord, Christian community manager for ChristianMingle's owner Spark Networks. "One of the amazing gifts of our age is that the internet can virtually erase many of the barriers to finding new relationships with people who share your interests and values."

ChristianMingle believes that one's faith is a deeply important part of who a person is, and that religious beliefs are a driving force behind what Christians look for in potential partners. The site is free to join, but don't let the low price tag fool you - it offers a fully featured dating service that is secure, private, and highly interactive. Members meet via email, chat rooms, message boards, and instant messenger which encourages a sense of community and creates an engaging social atmosphere.

Users can also connect and discuss their faith on Believe.com, ChristianMingle's faith-best content destination. Believe includes video and audio resources for the Christian community, as well as a "Verse of the Day" and a "Bible Study of the Day." Users can also browse a searchable Bible, prayer requests, and a church directory.

Nearly two million singles joined ChristianMingle in 2011, the site's most successful year yet. To celebrate their expansion, increase awareness of the site within the Christian community, and share members' success stories, ChristianMingle has launched the "Good News!" campaign, a series of online videos and television commercials that highlight the personal stories of couples who met on the site. "Every day, ChristianMingle members send over 100,000 messages," said Tre, one of the men featured in the advertisements. "I sent one of those messages and met my beautiful wife."

The "Good News!" campaign also reaches out to churches across the nation, to provide resources for group leaders and pastors. ChristianMingle hopes that their outreach efforts will do more than bring Christian singles together on the site - they hope to create a safe and active faith-based community for members with shared values that goes well beyond dating and marriage.

"ChristianMingle believes that marriage is important, but also that relationships and community are important," says Matthew Barnett, a pastor and ChristianMingle Advisory Board member. "ChristianMingle serves as a great resource for singles looking for companionship in like-minded Christians who share the same belief system and interests."

To find out about this dating site, please read our ChristianMingle.com review.

You know you've made it when the New York Times writes a feature about you.

As anyone who has followed my writing knows, I love nothing more than dating studies. I don't know what it is about them, but I'm incapable of ignoring a new study, survey, or experiment about love, romance, relationships, sex, dating, and everything in between. Maybe it's the idea of trying to quantify something that seems so unquantifiable, of explaining something that seems impossible to explain. Maybe it makes me feel like I'm putting my psychology degree to good use. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for a colorful infographic.

Whatever it is, the New York Times has caught the bug too. "There are millions of Americans seeking love on the Internet," begins a Times article called Love, Lies and What They Learned. "Little do they know that teams of scientists are eagerly watching them trying to find it." Studies of online dating habits have covered just about everything, from what triggers attraction to the role that politics plays in choosing a potential mate. The explosion of online dating sites has opened up a brave new world for researchers trying to understand the mechanics of love and connection, and they've made some very interesting discoveries:

• Do people lie on dating sites? Absolutely. According to a study led by Catalina L. Toma, an assistant professor in the department of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about 81% of daters misrepresent themselves online, but usually only by telling lies of the little and white variety. "Daters lie to meet the expectations of what they think their audience is," Toma explained, but their lies can't be too grand because they will eventually meet their date in person.

• Despite the variety available online, most people "stick to their own kind" when it comes to dating sites. "We are nowhere near the post-racial age," said Gerald A. Mendelsohn, a professor in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. His study found that even daters who stated that they were willing to date outside of their ethnicity didn't actually do it. Instead, he found that "white more than black, women more than men, and old more than young prefer a same-race partner."

• Politics are on almost everyone's mind as we approach the 2012 elections, but not on the minds of online daters. Rose McDermott, a professor of political science at Brown University, found that few singles are willing to express a political preference online for fear of attracting fewer dates. "I was personally really shocked," she said. "People were much more likely to say 'I'm fat' than 'I'm a conservative.'"

Are online dating studies the way of the scientific future? Yes, says Andrew T. Fiore, a former visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University. "Online dating provides an ecologically valid or true-to-life context for examining the risks, uncertainties and rewards of initiating real relationships with real people at an unprecedented scale," he told the Times. "As more and more of life happens online, it's less and less the case that online is a vacuum. It is life."