Google today said it will introduce a personalized home page that integrates e-mail (Gmail), news, weather, movie listings, and other features. The move is yet another signal of Google's ascent into portal territory. MSN, Yahoo!, and AOL offer users the ability to customize their home pages. It's also a sign that Google is looking for revenues beyond those from search-related advertising.

All things considered, we'd rather not revisit a topic we addressed yesterday but sometimes that's not possible. This is one of those days. Tuesday night we attended a fabulous Coldplay concert courtesy of AOL and AOL Music. (The concert will be available on AOL for free starting June 7). It was a good time, great music, and we enjoyed ourselves - thoroughly. Listening to the band's music this morning on an iPod Mini just wasn't the same as experiencing a live performance, that's for sure.

The Beacon Theater in New York City rocked last night courtesy of Coldplay and AOL. The band staged a live concert in advance of the release of its new CD "X&Y" on June 7. AOL will offer the exclusive 75-minute concert for free on AOLMusic.com starting June 7.

So finally, after at least a year of internal discussion that prompted months of speculation among media observers, The New York Times has made a decision to charge a subscription fee for access to its online archive, columnists, and selected content including multimedia reports.

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?