Here you will find an SEO expert's exhaustive case accusing Expedia of using the same sort of paid blog link scams that shady marketing firms sometimes try to sell us on.

In the second quarter, IAC swung from a $94.6 million profit last year to a $421.6 million loss this year. Don't blame Jakob Lodwick! His former company, Vimeo, is nowhere near the top of IAC/InterActiveCorp's expense report for the past quarter. The real problem at Barry Diller's Internet empire is Cornerstone Brands, a rollup of catalog companies undermined by weak consumer spending in home and apparel retail. Cornerstone's losses led to a $300 million writedown in goodwill in IAC's second quarter. In addition, the soft real estate market cut revenue for home financing site LendingTree nearly in half.IAC is moving ahead with plans to spin off four of its divisions by the end of August: HSN (which includes Cornerstone), Ticketmaster, Tree.com (which includes LendingTree), and Interval Leisure Group, which operates vacation sites including ResortQuest Hawaii. That leaves IAC with Ask.com, Match.com and Citysearch. What's happening? Simple: Diller and company have learned that bundling a bunch of diverse online businesses together doesn't create the promised "synergy" of the Web 1.0 boom. Better to let each site fend for itself. Since IAC got rid of Expedia in 2005 (Barry Diller's still chairman of the board), the travel site's ups and downs have closely followed the travel market. That's the watercooler version. You can wonk out with the full details.

Citing a more challenging consumer environment, greater customer-acquisition costs and investor reluctance to pay above-market prices for shares, Goldman Sachs today cut price targets for Internet stocks including Google, eBay, and Amazon by 10 percent. For more reasons why Wall Street is suddenly less impressed with your tech stock portfolio, see Goldman's entire report, embedded here:

On Friday, Citigroup's Mark Mahaney judged tech stocks on four criteria: International exposure, countercyclical hedges, least risk to 2008 Wall Street estimates and intrinsic valuation. Which means what? Dunno. Go to Seeking Alpha for that. But to find out if your company's on the OK or Not-So-OK list in light of this morning's Fed rate cut and stock-market dive, check out this list.

A Facebook application, "Where I've Been," reportedly sells to TripAdvisor, a division of online travel agency Expedia, for $3 million. This proves the strength of Facebook's so-called "platform" as a vehicle for flipping cheap, trivial ideas to gullible big companies, something everyone in the Valley has been longing for. Update: TripAdvisor is denying some or all of the report, dashing everyone's dreams of Facebook-app millions. [Inside Facebook]

Media mogul Barry Diller's planned stock buyback of online travel site Expedia falls victim to the current credit crisis. (We had no idea there was a "credit crisis," but apparently "the demise of cheap money in the aftermath of the housing industry's collapse [has led to a] resulting washout of junk lending," which might explain why no one's willing to float us a twenty at closing time anymore.) [NYP]

Despite millions of dollars spent on advertising, Orbitz remains, for doddering old webheads like yours truly, a disgusting carbonated beverage, not a troubled online trip booker. But investors are expected to find tomorrow's Orbitz IPO, in which the much-traveled Internet company hopes to raise $617 million, just as yucky. Here's why.