Mobile devices may still be ages away from being acknowledged as a real medium, but some advertisers are having moderate success with AvantGo, according to an announcement the company made this morning.

Two years ago, at our first Forecast conference, we decided to have one of our panels debate whether the web is a branding or a direct response medium. It was the most heated debate of the day. My, how things have changed! Nowadays, people roll their eyes at the topic. We all know it's both.

I spent Friday at the IAB Leadership Forum in New York and aside from being wowed by the event, the attendance and the overall "we're a legitimate medium now, not just a bunch of overly excited entrepreneurs" atmosphere, I spent the day talking with various people about the IAB's Cross Media Optimization Study and what it really means for the industry. Specifically, is anyone really paying attention?

It's not a sign of a stable economy, but it's music to the ears of Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder. Nielsen//NetRatings today reported that more than 17 million surfers, or nearly 13% of the active online population, logged on to career websites from home and work in April 2003.

I usually see red every time a company does a survey to prove that the world is in dire need of the products it makes, and most of those surveys quickly find their way to my "deleted" folder, but there was something so absurd in this one I had to mention it.

MSNBC.com came in first again. The site is ranked number one in the Current Events and Global News category for April 2003, according to the latest audience data released by Nielsen//NetRatings. Year-over-year unique visitors to MSNBC soared nearly 50% with traffic peaking during March and April 2003, as readers continued to log on to the Internet for breaking news and events in record numbers.

AOL should follow the lead of Yahoo and MSN and get out of the dial-up doldrums. A little less than a year ago, Yahoo! signed a co-branded DSL deal with SBC Communications, which has since attracted nearly 1 million subscribers.

The Online Publishers Association today released yet another piece of research, which sheds more light on the "daytime is online primetime" concept. Focusing on the At Work Internet audience (users who accessed the Internet from work within the past 30 days for non-email purposes), the study found that for nearly three in ten work web users, the Internet is the only medium consumed during the daytime.

What are American college students using the web for? With nearly 10 million active users in March 2003, the U.S. university Internet audience is both sizable and influential. They definitely prefer the web to the campus library, and MP3s to CDs, but their favorite online tool, by far, is instant messenger (which should warm the hearts of Wall Street Journal execs who yesterday partnered with AOL to deliver their content through AIM).

To borrow a part of a thought from Mark Naples' commentary in MediaDailyNews today, the current spam crisis is indeed reminiscent of the privacy problems a few years back: we just can't seem to be able to stop talking about it, and everyone is getting involved. Offering anti-spam solutions and policies is the new "in" thing to do.