comScore World Metrix's proprietary audience report for April 2006 showed the total number of unique visitors to MSN Spaces has more than doubled in the past 12 months, from 41.65 million to 101 million. Figures compiled by comScore Media Metrix indicate that during April 2006, nearly one in seven Internet users worldwide had visited MSN Spaces.

Please note that your MSN Space's URL will change on June 5, 2006. As part of investments in the improvement of MSN Spaces, it we will be migrating all of the URLs from http://spaces.msn.com/NAME to http://NAME.spaces.msn.com. (For instance, instead of http://spaces.msn.com/thespacecraft/ you will now see http://thespacecraft.spaces.msn.com.)

This is the second url change users will have to endure, and it won't be the final. During the 10.5 update earlier this year, the team removed the "/members/" part from blog urls and with the eventual migration of Spaces to the Windows Live platform, the domain will surely move to spaces.live.com. No doubt there will be important technical reasons which necessitate these changes occuring when they do, however logic would suggest that it would be less confusing for the end users if at least two of the changes occured at the same time. I'm expecting to see some irate Spaces users commenting at the post linked below.

Meanwhile, MSN Spaces users now can earn money from their blogs by becoming Amazon.com associates, and also by running ads distributed by Kanoodle.com.

In the case of Amazon.com, users would choose which books to feature on their blog's book list section. They would get paid anytime one of their blog visitors clicks on one of the featured books and purchases it from Amazon.com, according to another posting on Thursday on the official MSN Spaces blog. This program is available to bloggers in the United States, U.K., Canada, Germany, France and Japan.

For the Kanoodle.com program, MSN Spaces users need to sign up to have the ads displayed on their blogs. The ads will be contextually related to the blog's content, and MSN Spaces users will get paid every time a visitor clicks on an ad, Kanoodle.com announced Monday. This program is available to MSN Spaces users in the United States and Canada and only if their blogs are in English, according to the MSN Spaces team official blog.

In love with your brand new Xbox 360! Of course you are. Well now you can show that love by adding your Xbox Recent Games Played and your Xbox Gamercard to your MSN Space. There are even five new themes all about Xbox.

The latest scuttlebutt is that MSN Spaces is partnering with Getzville, N.Y.-based Kanoodle Inc., a provider of Web advertising. This way, MSN Spaces bloggers can choose ads to display, and share in revenues based on the number of clicks generated, according to the sources.

Firstly, it allows a user to publish different information to different groups of people. Personal information can be available only to their Messenger contact list, for example, while business related information could be available publicly.

Secondly, it allows people who subscribe to your information to be automatically informed of any updates you make, be it via your Spaces profile or your Messenger and Mail Beta contact list. It is worth noting that users can view who has subscribed to their Live Contacts information.

While using these three sites, we paid careful attention to how each blog-creating service handled four basic tasks: publishing text entries, or "posting" as it is called in blog land; adding photos; publishing links to other Web pages on our blogs; and providing privacy (if desired) online. We also took note of the overall style and formatting options provided on each site.

Our verdict: Microsoft's MSN Spaces did the best job of performing these tasks in a way that was organized and self-explanatory. Yahoo 360 was almost as easy, but it tries to tie in the use of too many other Yahoo services. Blogger.com has a long way to go until it becomes as easy to use as the others.

My verdict: MSN Spaces is very well done. It makes it easy to create a simple, attractive blog with text, links and photos, and to customize the blog in interesting ways.

The blogs Microsoft allows you to create in Spaces can be very attractive, but, in my judgment, the system doesn't allow as much customization or tweaking as Blogger does. Still, Spaces offers all the basics.