In yet another sign that "the industry needs to completely rethink display ads," eMarketer has revised its online advertising outlook for 2009 down again, cutting its forecast to $25.7 billion, from $28.4 billion. Six months ago, the online industry research aggregator forecast that online spending would total $30 billion. That figure has now been cut twice. Meanwhile, Google should remain the biggest beneficiary of the 9% growth projected for 2009, down from 11% growth in 2008, as its search advertising system is widely believed to drive sales and conversions for marketers. In fact, eMarketer actually raised its search advertising estimate …

Google is reportedly preparing to lay off as many as 10,000 workers, according to sources at the blog Web Guild. Hundreds of employees have already been laid off and there are reports that about 500 of them were recruiters for the search giant. In fact, this is one of the reasons the company was able to meet Wall Street's Q3 expectations, Web Guild claims. Google has clearly managed to get around the SEC's requirement that it publicly disclose layoffs by classifying close to 30% of its workforce as contract workers. According to SEC documents, Google has 20,123 employees, but Web …

Web 2.0 still has yet to prove itself, monetarily speaking, but some Internet watchers are already looking ahead to Web 3.0 and the notion of the "semantic Web." in particular. Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the worldwide Web, coined the phrase nearly 10 years ago. His vision was that all Web data would one day be read and interpreted by machines. In other words, "the next generation of the web will bring us out of information overload and be more relevant and meaningful," reports Ad Age. In turn, this will help solve some of marketing's biggest problems. Once …

There's a school of thought out there that believes that in rough times, people always spend money on entertainment, and that video games in particular are recession-proof. So far, the numbers seem to back that argument up: October video game sales were through the roof, while the recent release of the new "World of Warcraft" expansion broke the all-time record for single-day PC game sales. However, Cnet's Daniel Terdiman points out that even though sales are up and the holiday season looks bright, Wall Street so far doesn't appear to be all that impressed. Then again, what else is new? …

In the end, Twitter decided not to sell itself to fellow Web 2.0 sensation Facebook, but Kara Swisher, who broke that story yesterday, wonders whether that was the right move. At least one of her sources thinks the decision not to sell was incredibly foolish: "If Twitter turned down 500m in stock, they should go see a shrink," the Internet exec said. Of course, not everyone agreed. Said another big Web player: "Why should Twitter hitch itself to Facebook's horse, when they don't have too?" Still another exec responded with a more middle-of-the-road observation: "I think strategic buyers are going …