The Knot, the online destination for people who are planning their nuptials, has scored a Best of the Internet award from PC Magazine. TheKnot.com is a great website-it has chat features, a gift registry, shopping areas, contest opportunities, and offers just about any kind of advice someone who is getting married might need from choosing invitations and rings, to reception etiquette and honeymoon ideas.

Just when you thought the online advertising sector was picking up (and it is), there's a radical proposal advanced. This, from Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel, who proposed that one day (perhaps soon), Yahoo!'s subscription-only services could be ad-free. Semel, speaking yesterday at a Commonwealth Club event in Santa Clara, Calif., said ad-free services on Yahoo! are being contemplated but offered few details.

Lycos today said it's overhauling itself to become a one-stop shop comprised of for-pay premium services including social networking, personals, gaming, shopping, and just abot everything else. The overhaul is much-needed--the portal has practically dropped off the map in the last year or more, eclipsed by Yahoo!, Google, and others.

Search marketing is such a burgeoning area of interactive marketing and media that there are entire conferences on the subject. I'm referring, of course, to Search Engine Strategies 2004, the Jupiter Media conference taking place March 1-4 in New York City.

A report about online dating from Hitwise fell into my in-box and it's got some juicy morsels. For starters, the average online session for a site in the dating category in January 2004 is 11 minutes 55 seconds, an eight percent increase over January 2003, and 33.3 percent of visitors to online dating sites come via search engines and directories, and 23.3 percent via e-mail services.

Yesterday's Online Minute reported that Jupiter projects the search market will swell to $14.8 billion by 2008. That is inaccurate.

Search is one of the fastest, if not the fastest growing area of online advertising. You've heard it before. You'll probably hear it again. In fact, I'm sure you'll hear it at Jupiter Media's Search Engine Strategy conference next month.

Yahoo! launched its new search capability early today EST. The move, which Yahoo! had been working toward for several months, effectively eliminates the use of Google as its default search provider.

Talk about a surprise. Initiative Media has won the estimated $200 million AOL offline media business in a run-off with Carat. The months-long review process pitted Initiative, the incumbent, against Carat, and Starcom, which withdrew, allegedly at the last minute on Feb. 6, after citing a conflict with Disney.

One thing that's abundantly clear to me -- all media is undergoing tremendous change right now. Change owing to a variety of factors including the proliferation of media options, media fragmentation, emerging technologies, and the 24/7 nature of the Internet.