Digital Sky Technologies may be looking to grow its online empire a little bit. The Russian investment firm is said to be making a play for Aol's (AOL) ICQ instant messaging service. A report in the Wall Street Journal, which cites sources familiar with the talks, says that the discussions are still in early stages. And, in case Digital Sky doesn't bite, Aol is exploring options with other companies. The WSJ puts the possible sale price at $200 million to $300 million.

Back in July, Digital Sky pumped another $100 million into Facebook, paying $14.77 a share for the privilege of investing in the white-hot social media company which could be setting the stage for an initial public offering next year.

Nielsen/NetRatings should be out with September numbers for unique visitors to major websites by Tuesday of next week. But, ahead of those numbers, it is informative to look at the Alexa ratings from the website-tracking division of Amazon.com, Inc. They may be a fairly good preview of next week's ratings news.

According to Alexa, AOL.com's ranking among all websites this week is 41st. Its three month average ranking is 36th, which with these kind of audience measurements is not a meaningful difference. The same holds true for CNN.com. Its rank for the current week is 36th and its average rank for the last three months is 31st.

There is more movement among smaller websites where traffic is likely to fluctuate more than it does in the Top 50.

Mapquest, a surprisingly large property, ranks 123rd this week and has a three month average rank of 112th. AIM.com, the home site of AOL Instant Messenger, ranked 355th this week and 335th for its three month average.

ICQ.com, another AOL site for chat and message traffic, rose from 300th place as its three month average to 324th for the week.

The largest drop was for Netscape.com which was changed from an Internet portal to a social news site in July. Its three-month rank is 383rd. Its average rank for the current week is 554th. By contrast, its closest competition, Digg.com, ranked 91st for the last three months and 85th this week.

For reference, the top six websites worldwide as measured by Alexa, are Yahoo!, MSN, Google, Chinese web properties Baidu.com and qq.com, and MySpace. Unlike Nielsen or comScore, Alexa measures individual sites. The other services measure site families, so, in the case of AOL, most of the sites mentioned here would be reported as a group and the overall ranking would be much higher. (comScore has told us that they break out both site families and individual sites.)

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and AOL management probably hope that the Nielsen/NetRatings numbers paint a somewhat better picture.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Time Warner's largest web properties were primarily flat year-over-previous-year based on new data from Nielsen Netratings.

The AOL brand, which includes all of AOL's channels including AIM and Moviefone, had a total unique audience of 74,530,000. The number was flat with July 2006, and down slightly from last years August figure of 75,721.000.

The AOL Instant Messenger channel continued to fall. Total unique visitors for August 2006 were 45,669,000. This was down from 47,035,000 in July and 53,504,000 last August.

The AOL Moviefone channel also fell slightly from 11,830,000 in August 2005 to 10,070,000 unique visitors this August. The figure for July was 11,904,000.

The audience for the critical CNN brand was steady. August 2006 had 23,559,000 unique visitors. A year ago, the figure was 23,567,000.

At online community site ICQ, the audience continues to drop rapidly. August has 1,243,000 million "uniques." A year ago, the figure was 1,912,000. The July 2006 figure was 1,408,000.

Netscape continued its year-over-year decline, but moved up some from the immediately previous month. With the shift to a social news site, Netscape had a unique visitor count of 8,248,000 in August, down from 13,175,000 a year ago. In July 2006, the site's audience was 7,811,000.

Some net properties continue to have rapid growth. News Corp unit MySpace had 49 million unique visitors in August, up 139% from last year.

The issue of audience growth, particularly at the websites that are part of the AOL unit, remains critical to the company's strategy of migrating from a subscription-based revenue model to one that relies more on internet advertising. Although Time Warner has not stated it in so many words, it would seem essential that the large AOL properties grow at least as fast as major competitors like MSN, Yahoo! and Google to capture their proportionate share of the growing online ad market.

Some of us know the Nokia Internet tablet product, model 770. This device was released last year as an easy (and very portable) way to surf the web from home or work -- or in public if that's your thing -- using built-in wireless Internet access. This product was a precursor to the Microsoft UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) that was announced just a few months ago. These devices have very limited utility for everyday computing tasks, regardless of hardware specifications, because they lack a full-fledged keyboard -- a dealbreaker for many. But these devices do have their place. Or at least, I think they do.

Nokia has just announced that Google Talk -- the instant messaging program from our Google friends -- will come pre-installed on an updated version of the Nokia 770 Internet tablet. This is the first time Google Talk will come pre-installed on anything, so it's more or less of a feature debut than anything. Competing instant messengers from Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger come pre-installed on millions of cellphones these days -- in addition to computer use -- so why would Nokia pre-install Google Talk now, at this time?

First of all, it highlights Nokia's ties to the hottest Internet company right now -- Google. Secondly, Google may be trying to get customers to use its IM program more as wireless Internet use becomes more common in public areas. Of course, there are constant rumors that Google wants to continue opening up WiFi hotspots around the country.

While folks won't take their laptop to dinner and a night out, they may take a small internet tablet (or a WiFi cellphone). Google may be planning to be the IM program of choice as WiFi-type consumer connectivity becomes more common in public. Should investors take note of a seemingly-insignificant development like this? I would have to say yes.