If you kept an eye on the cable ratings charts from this week, you may have noticed a narrower gap between Countdown with Keith Olbermmann and The O'Reilly Factor in the 25-54 demo. On Monday there was a 15,000 viewer gap; on Wednesday just 6,000.

Many emailers have opined that the closeness is based on viewer sampling from Olbermann's NBC network appearance Sunday night. Others have written that it's because O'Reilly was off this week. An MSNBC insider tells TVNewser "Countdown has been gaining steam for months, it gets better and better creatively and viewers recognize that."

We still have Thursday's and Friday's numbers yet to come to determine if there's any trend.