Something about this news cycle seems a little familiar. In a mild aftershock to comScore's "bombshell" report last month about flat growth in paid clicks on Google's search ads, the research firm has issued the same report for February. Again, growth in paid clicks held steady, and again Google's stock took a hit from jittery investors, though not as sharp as last time around.

The fallout from the first report (Google shares fell nearly 10 percent) prompted comScore to issue a lengthy clarification, explaining that the figures were less the result of Google getting sucked into a recessionary vortex than of a concerted effort on Google's part to place fewer, more relevant ads on its search pages. As an aggregate figure, then, paid click growth would be expected to fall off. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

To no one's surprise, Google was mum on the comScore report, but speaking at a Bear Stearns media event earlier this month, Google executives assured analysts that, yes, the change in paid clicks was by design, and the flat growth a predictable byproduct. While allowing that Google was not immune from macroeconomic concerns, the even clickthrough rates did not portend a coming financial disaster.

What's changed in a month? For starters, the days of Bear Stearns hosting analyst forums are numbered. Bear's collapse, coupled with a gathering mound of sobering economic indicators, has done nothing to assuage fears of a recession. But what's happening with Google's paid clicks should not be a surprise. The first report turned into a tremendous media blitz, but evidently the explanations did not completely resonate with investors. Still, kicking its stock down another 3 percent on the release of the report seems more panicky than prudent.

eBay's new strategy of doting on the buyers at the expense of, it seems to many, the sellers has made the e-commerce heavyweight a lot of enemies. Dissent among the power sellers has manifested in the form of a highly publicized boycott, and there's another one planned for May 1.

Citing independent tracking firms reporting double-digit listings declines, the sellers have claimed victory. A noisy flock of startups and niche players have been crowing about frustrated merchants who have abandoned eBay in favor of their own sites.

No doubt eBay has taken a PR hit on this one, but as a publicly traded company, it's got shareholders to satisfy. By the looks of a latest research note from analysts at Jeffries & Co., it's doing all right.

"eBay's February pricing tweaks are having positive effects on 1Q results," the analysts wrote, projecting listing growth that would translate into a 9 percent year-over-year revenue increase, toward the high end of its guidance. "We believe that the pricing tweaks on marketplaces are having the desired impact on listings growth."

The changes the analysts are referencing concern sellers' fees -- namely, that eBay has cut listing fees while raising commission fees, in effect moving the fees to the back end. Incoming CEO John Donahoe also announced that eBay will tweak its search algorithm tweaked to give sellers with the best feedback ratings higher page rankings. Of greatest pain was the news that sellers would no longer have a mechanism to leave negative feedback about buyers. That issue gets at the heart of what the strike is about: sellers' feeling like eBay is rolling over on them and pandering to the buyers.

It's a case of a large company placing its end-users' experience above that of its affiliates. It's also a symptom that eBay is growing up, and in so doing might no longer be the same whimsical free-for-all it was in the heady days of its steep ascent. eBay isn't turning its back on the sellers entirely, but it has determined that making its buyers happy is more important than coddling its sellers. We'll suspend judgment until the 1Q earnings call, but the Jeffries report gives the Donahoe strategy a healthy vote of confidence.

The grown-up social network just got a little more serious.

LinkedIn has now opened its site for companies to create profiles, giving members a snapshot overview of what the company is about and who works for it.

The feature launched with more than 160,000 profiles, ranging from Fortune 500 gargantuans like eBay to smaller enterprises, as well as charitable groups, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The profile pages display members information of the sort offered through directory services such as Redbooks and Hoovers -- fast facts like where the company is located, its size and revenue.

In typically LinkedIn fashion, the profiles also show members how many of the company's employees are in their network, who they are and where they work. It also gives insight into the interconnectedness of businesses by displaying which companies have the greatest overlaps among their employees' networks. Could be handy for job seekers, folks trying to gain contacts within a certain organization or even run some low-wattage corporate espionage.

All of this is to say that LinkedIn has again proved that the utility of the social Web does not lie solely in the incessant poking of Facebook friends or the adolescent expression of burgeoning individuality through a meth-inspired MySpace rant.

The Internet makes politics fun, does it not?

Alternately, the Web has helped Barack Obama rocket past Hillary Clinton in the fund-raising scramble, and played host to a vicious smear campaign claiming, among other things, that the senator from Illinois and lifelong Christian is an inveterate Muslim who took his oath of office with his hand on the Koran.

Ah, the knife cuts both ways, on that Web of ours.

Never one to stay out of a political fracas playing out on the Internet, MoveOn.org has taken up Obama's part with its "Obama in 30 Seconds" contest, calling for submissions of short-form videos endorsing his candidacy. The user-generated video contest reprises MoveOn's 2004 "Bush in 30 Seconds" promotion, which resulted in videos torching the current president for the faulty intelligence that gave cause for the war in Iraq, the No Child Left Behind educational initiative, deficit spending and a skein of other issues.

MoveOn will award the winning entrant with a national airing of his or her ad, and $20,000 of video equipment.

The political action group has also lined up an impressive list of judges, including such luminary cause-heads as Ben Affleck, Moby and hip hop mogul Russell Simmons.

MoveOn is doing the same thing that a few of the more adventurous marketers have been attempting through consumer-generated ad campaigns. When a consumer becomes an evangelist for your brand, the reasoning goes, the message becomes much more convincing. The idea of the customer testimonial is as old as advertising itself, of course, but the viral distribution made possible by the YouTubes and MySpaces allows those messages to ricochet around an enormous audience, stripped away from the unseemly baggage that comes with a corporate-created branded message.

The problem for advertisers is that lighting up the Internet with a whimsical, branded romp on YouTube doesn't always deliver a return on the investment of promoting and managing the campaign. In politics, however, the translation between buzz and campaign momentum is far more direct.

Then, too, advertisers are crushingly aware of their responsibilities as stewards of their brands, so for many, the idea of relinquishing their messaging mission to the hoi polloi makes about as much sense as starting the day off with a tall glass of thermometer mercury.

Political branding plays by a looser set of rules, and judging by the best of the entries in MoveOn's 2004 Bush-bashing contest -- which range from poignant and tragic to, well, very funny -- Obama the brand is in no great danger. MoveOn also covers itself with the disclaimer that the contest is not endorsed by the Obama campaign.

The submission period begins March 27, with the winner to be announced April 17, a convenient five days before the mission-critical Pennsylvania primary.

Hulu, the joint Web video venture that NBC Universal and Fox launched to great fanfare last March, is slated for a full public launch tomorrow. Hulu has been available as an invite-only, private beta service since October.

Unlike YouTube, the overwhelming leader in online video, Hulu only offers professional content. Since its inception, Hulu has been working to build content partnerships to expand its catalog of TV shows, feature films and video clips, which it streams for free, supported by pre-roll and mid-roll ads.

Hulu videos also show up on thousands of external Web sites, including AOL, Comcast, MySpace and Yahoo.

For what it does -- offer a large and growing trove of premium, recently aired television content for free, and legally -- Hulu is remarkable. Though the company is still courting ABC and CBS as content partners, Hulu has quadrupled the size of its catalog since it began testing, CEO Jason Kilar told The New York Times.

People have complained that the streaming quality could be improved, and warned that its business model is at constant risk because it doesn't own any of the content on its site. This means that when a TV company is ready to release a season's worth of episodes on DVD, there's nothing to stop it from yanking the shows off of Hulu.

It's also true that Hulu has long ridden a wave of hype, and it's far from clear if the economics are on its side. Taking a step back to look at the macro trends at work here, however, Hulu still seems like a great idea. The amount of video that people watch online is increasing dramatically, growth which shows no signs of falling off. Advertisers are fast realizing that video ads are more engaging than static display ads, and are willing to pay more for those type of placements. Now launches Hulu, with a repository of premium content that viewers (U.S. only, for now) can watch for free.

Now that it's opening its doors to the public, the story of Hulu will begin in earnest. As Hulu continues to forge new content partnerships, its success or failure could become a telling chapter in the larger drama of the new entertainment economy being born from the convergence of old and new media.

In its short, dazzling life Facebook has managed to charm analysts and commentators into a pie-eyed swoon, but with success come growing pains. Sixty-six million members are great; widgets are fun and whimsical, but sooner or later the company's got to grow up and start making money.

Facebook has lured away a top executive from Google to serve as its COO, reporting directly to 23-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Sheryl Sandberg will oversee the meat-and-potatoes matters of managing sales, business development, public policy, privacy and communications, and taking Facebook's operations global.

The strategy is similar to a president-elect, possessed of admirable vision but marginal experience, filling his cabinet with political heavyweights to assuage the doubts that he is too green to hold such an important office.

Zuckerberg is a Harvard dropout who has proved, yet again, that you don't need a diploma to build something that millions of people love and make a pile of money doing it.

Sandberg graduated from Harvard with summa cum laude honors as the top economics student in her class, and returned to Harvard's business school to take an MBA with the highest distinction. She served as chief of staff for the U.S. Treasury Department during the Clinton administration before embarking on a six-year stint at Google, where she most recently held the position of vice president of global online sales and operations.

It's no secret that if Facebook is to become anything approaching the black swan that Wall Street hopes, Zuckerberg is going to need some help. The geeky, taciturn head of a company thrust (reluctantly, it sometimes seems) into the public eye seems very much at home in the quicksilver world Silicon Valley, but turning a flashy startup into a cash machine like Google will require adult supervision, and credit Zuckerberg for knowing it.

One could interpret the hiring of Sandberg as Zuckerberg lining up the firepower he will need to take the company public, eventually. On 60 Minutes earlier this year, Zuckerberg told Lesley Stahl that it wouldn't happen this year. If and when Facebook makes an IPO, it will be an exciting event on both coasts, to be sure, but in the meantime, investors will need some important questions answered.

In October, when Microsoft bought into Facebook with a 1.6 percent equity stake, valuing the company at $15 billion, the figure exceeded most generous estimates; to some, it seemed staggering. After all, Facebook has offered very little evidence that it can turn a profit.

Investors will note Google's buyer's remorse about its $900 million deal to serve ads on MySpace. Social networks weren't monetizing as strongly as he'd hoped, he told analysts on Google's most recent earnings call. What will Sandberg bring from her experience at Google to show that Facebook will become the advertising cash cow that MySpace has not yet become?

Then there's the matter of corporate tone. Facebook's delayed responses to users' privacy concerns have at times struck a note of haughty indifference. ("Calm down. Breathe. We hear you." --Zuckerberg to Facebook members voicing privacy concerns over the news feeds feature.) With a restricted-access communications department, Facebook has established a pattern of stonewalling, and then finally relenting, when members of the community protest the way that a new feature is added, such as the news feeds or the Beacon advertising program. As a result of this slowness to grasp the intensity of members' ire, Facebook has made privacy a much larger issue than it needs to be.

All this is to say that Zuckerberg has built something that simply became much bigger than he was able to manage. There's no shame in that. Neither Sergey nor Larry holds the top spot at the colossus they built. Poaching a top executive from a company like Google to serve as the company's No. 2 sends a clear message to investors that Facebook is lacing up the gloves, and getting ready to step into the ring.

Reversing his earlier ruling, Judge Jeffrey White lifted the domain-name block on Wikileaks.org on Friday, returning the whistelblower site to normal operating status in a decision celebrated by the free-speech/press advocates that had rallied to its side. And with good reason.

Wikileaks exists as a forum for people who have evidence of some kind of corporate or government impropriety that's eating away at their conscience but that they cannot come forward with publicly. In a word, whistleblowers.

Thanks to documents posted Wikileaks, the world learned a little more about how prisoners are treated at Guantanamo Bay, human-rights concerns in China and political corruption in Kenya. Go back a generation, and recall that it was an individual bearing witness to corruption under the cloak of anonymity who exposed the Nixon administration as the paranoid and unlawful enterprise that it had sadly become.

The Wikileaks case centered around leaked documents that purportedly exposed wealthy individuals washing money through tax shelters created through the Cayman Islands subsidiary of a major Swiss bank. The bank, Julius Baer & Co., claimed that the documents were fraudulent and exposed the personal information of its clients.

Last week's ruling had nothing to do with the authenticity of the documents. Rather, Judge White ruled that First Amendment concerns (as well as some jurisdictional uncertainties) required him to reverse his earlier injunction against the site.

This case struck an important (albeit preliminary) victory not only for free speech, but for the role of the Internet as a journalistic outlet. As The New York Times aptly put it, the injunction was "akin to shutting down a newspaper because of objections to one article."

In America, we don't do that. My thanks to the court for reversing what could have become a dangerous precedent.