While the MSNBC cable network founders, MSNBC.com appears to be surging. MSNBC.com, not to be confused with MSNBC cable, was ranked the No. 1 news and information Web site by Nielsen/NetRatings for the second consecutive month. According to Nielsen, MSNBC.com racked up 23,598,000 unique users in April and saw a 40 percent increase in page views over March.

Google says it snapped up Dodgeball.com, a two-person start-up that created a mobile messaging service to enable users to alert friends as to where they're socializing. The service received plenty of buzz in New York City. The two guys who founded the company did so while they were New York University grad students. Dodgeball was uniquely promoted by the talented new media creative Doug Jaeger and his company, The Happy Corp.

It was a big night for creative talent. Last night's One Show celebration honored the advertising industry's best print, TV, radio, design, and interactive campaigns.

America Online keeps rolling out the freebies as it heads toward what feels like the longest run-up to a launch in history. AOL says it will relaunch AOL.com as a Web-wide portal this fall. AOL yesterday said it will offer a free e-mail service, like Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo!'s free mail, as a companion to its popular instant messaging service (AIM). AOL says it will offer the free e-mail service to some 20 million users of AIM in a test. The service will be supported with advertising.

Details about Microsoft's next-generation Xbox video game console were leaked over the Internet yesterday. The details came out just three days prior to the global launch of Microsoft's latest Xbox console known as "Xbox 360." So much for secrecy on one of the year's hottest new product launches.

Google went offline for 15 minutes over the weekend. Yikes. That's like a network going dark. Remember when CBS went dark a few years ago after a sports broadcast?

Search is speeding up. Google launched a test version of something it calls Web Accelerator, software that speeds up Web searches and content-loading. Web Accelerator, which runs with a user's Internet browser, directs searches and page requests through Google servers. The product works by deploying a cache on local computers and Google servers.

Yahoo! says its video search service is now open for business. The service, which launched as a test in December, allows users to search for video clips of all kinds - news, music, and movie trailers.

Here are a few interesting facts on blogs from Perseus Development Corp. which randomly surveyed 10,000 blogs on 20 blog-hosting services: Perseus reports that there are currently 31.6 million hosted blogs that were created on services like BlogSpot, LiveJournal, Xanga, and MSN Spaces. There were 10 million created in the first quarter of 2005 alone. The 31.6 million is expected to grow to 53.4 million by the end of the year.

Forrester Research has a new online forecast today. The researcher reports that nearly half of all marketers plan to decrease spending in traditional advertising channels like magazines, direct mail, and newspapers, all to earmark those dollars for online ad spending this year.