Dotcoms are no longer making news with free new offerings. Instead, headlines these days are all about lay-offs and new pay-for services. Does this mean that the free online lunch is over -- again? Indeed, says The Economist, eight years after the dotcom crash, Web firms hoping to sell advertising against free content and services, find themselves in a familiar situation. It all started when Google went public in 2004, inflating a new "Web 2.0" bubble. Google's ability to place small, targeted text ads next to search results made it an Internet juggernaut, and sparked new hope that there was …

In a blog post, Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis, who will be speaking at MediaPost's OMMA Global Hollywood event in Los Angeles next week, explains the reasoning behind his offer to pay Twitter $250,000 to make him one of the service's "suggested" users. For starters, he says, the offer was for Mahalo's Answers product, not for Calacanis' personal account, which he says is "probably bigger than it should be" at 60,000-plus followers. For a growing company like Mahalo, having its Answers product on the suggested users page represents a massive opportunity, resulting in as many as 10,000 new users …

Apple on Thursday announced that it would start selling HD quality movies through its iTunes media store, but Dan Rayburn of The Business of Online Video says the business model is fundamentally flawed, as the HD downloads will cost $20-$3 more than the average DVD on Amazon. "This is just stupid," Rayburn argues, "how on earth can the studios continue to charge more for a digital download than a physical DVD?" Digital downloads cost far less to produce and distribute than DVDs, which have manufacturing and packaging costs. Meanwhile, the bandwidth cost to download a two-hour movie is mere pennies, …

Former MTV and AOL Networks CEO Bob Pittman thinks there's one glaring omission from the nearly $800 billion stimulus package: ad incentives for corporations that have slashed their marketing budgets. "To get people spending again, and the economy moving, the government needs to provide help for businesses in America to advertise their products and services," Pittman writes in an opinion piece for Fortune Magazine. He adds: "There's a reason that America is the largest consumer market in the world: It also happens to be the largest advertising market in the world." Is consumer spending directly related to how much corporations …

Microsoft has one advantage over Google in the search market, according to CEO Steve Ballmer. He says his company can experiment, while Google, the market leader, is forced to play it safe. "Google does have to be all things to all people," Ballmer told Bloomberg. "Our search does not need to be all things to all people." Ballmer noted that the challenge facing the search giant is similar to the challenge Microsoft faces with its Windows operating system, which needs to appeal to many different types of customers. As such, Ballmer says Google would be tentative about changing a formula …

Analyst Ross Sandler of RBC Capital Markets has made waves with a research note claiming that based on its current growth rate, Facebook will surpass Google in size by 2011-2012. Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget notes that this is a "startling" comparison, even though he doesn't believe Facebook can maintain current growth. Sandler also illustrates how important the social networking giant has become to Google as a source of traffic, as a whopping 19% of Google sessions now come from Facebook. "At the very least," Blodget says, "this will likely give Facebook the leverage to negotiate a sweet referral deal …

As Personal Technology's Walt Mossberg points out, when Microsoft makes changes to its browser, Internet Explorer, "vast numbers of people" are affected. Well, today, the software giant is making its biggest change to IE in years, with the new IE8. In a lengthy article, Mossberg reviews the updated version after months of testing. "I've found it to be a big improvement over its predecessor, IE7, and a much closer competitor to its main rival, Mozilla's Firefox," he says. In short, "IE8 is more stable than IE7, more compatible with industrywide Web standards, and packed with new features that improve navigation, …