Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) will be reporting Q3 data after the bell today. Is the market excited over the Internet portal's prospects? Well, judging by the price action I'm seeing on my screen right now, I'd have to say the answer is a definite no. The stock is down 1.7% as I write this in early afternoon trading.

According to Earnings.com, Yahoo!, whose colleagues include Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), is expected to say it made 7 cents per share in the third quarter. That won't be so great, since it will represent an earnings decline compared to last year's income stat. Of course, we should remember that it won't be just about the earnings per share. We'll have to hear what management has to say about future prospects.

Want to see what AOL looks like in Mandarin? Check out the company's beta launch of its new web portal serving Taiwan.

A division of Time Warner, Inc. (NYSE: TWX), AOL also noted that it will add new content and features in the coming months designed for the Taiwanese audience. Content included right now is Entertainment and Finance, plus a technology channel featuring Engadget in Chinese. It also has a search feature in Chinese, which is powered by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), like the content search elsewhere. It is using Truveo.com for video search.

AOL is developing content partnerships with regional pubs, including United Daily News (udn.com) and Phoenix New Media. AOL is using its worldwide distribution pact in place with Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) to deliver a co-branded local language portal and search site for HP users in Taiwan.

Taiwan is not the last country in the pipeline. AOL has launched 18 country-specific portals and plans to have a total of 30 countries by the end of 2008. The H-P bundling software is one of the key metrics it will be using.

Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) is recently up 13 cents to $26.88 in pre-open trading.

• YHOO is expected to report EPS on 10/16.
  
• YHOO October option implied volatility of 47 is above its 26-week average of 35 according to Track Data, suggesting larger risk.

eBay (NASDAQS: EBAY) closed at $39.18.

• EBAY is expected to report EPS on 10/17.
  
• Goldman Sachs CO said on 9/26: "Raising estimates due to continued revenue/listing improvements."
  
• EBAY October at the money straddle is priced at $3.05. EBAY October option implied volatility of 37 is above its 26-week average of 33 according to Track Data, indicating slightly larger risk.

Daily options Update is provided by Stock Specialist Paul Foster of theflyonthewall.com.

AOL's Spanish-language portal, AOL Latino, is now available for free like most AOL services. The free site was formally launched on Monday. AOL Latino was previously a $26-per-month service. This is another example of AOL scaling to a free operation.

AOL still charges for dial-up Internet access, extra online storage, and premium security services. Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) apparently is not planning to give those away, although basic versions of storage and security software are free.

Is it more inflammatory in a headline to say, "death to Google" than "death to AOL" or "death to Yahoo!"? That seems to be what everyone's going with, today.

Because today is the day that everyone's reviewing the keynote speech of longtime cable exec Leo Hindery, at the Convergence 2.0 conference yesterday. Hindery (representing the "Washington Insider" viewpoint but, seemingly, attacking his subject matter in an Infrastructure-is-King Insider kind of way) represented the media universe as consisting of three pillars:

• Content (ABC, NBC, Disney, Time Warner's content side?),
• Portals (Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and eBay) and
• "Non-Broadcast Distributors" (notably, cable and the satellites)

He put numbers to everything, so I can make fun of it more easily. Portals have a collective market cap of $225 billion, he says. Advertising represents two-thirds of this, or about $150 billion. But as the content that makes up the backbone of these portals is non-proprietary, it will be easy for the content providers to steal that money away.

Hence, death to Google. And three of the other four (I haven't found where he said which of the content providers would survive).

Last week, we blogged about Yahoo!'s acquisition of Meedio Software (and its top notch team) and wondered a bit as to what the implications might be. 

Well, it didn't take the company long to pull the home media products into the fold and begin promoting Meedio grown offerings to the public. As Om posted last night, Yahoo! is offering downloads of the super cool computer based digital video recorders (DVR's) for free. 

You gotta love the price!

Thus far, the major news media has not jumped on this story and waxed on the implications for Yahoo! -- nor has it mentioned how this might affect Tivo and the cable companies who sell DVR boxes and monthly subscriptions with similar services. But this is only a matter of time as the service begins to attract more users.

Yahoo! has integrated the product into its "Yahoo! Go" platform which hints at where the company might be headed as it appears it is bent on controlling an ever broadening swath of its users' social and multimedia experiences even fostering the convergence of the two.

It also serves as one more example of the dynamic potential of the portal model which, when you think about it, is still only in its formative stages.

After its failed $200 million venture into China in 2001, AOL is getting back in the 'China Game.'

The latest China buzz being the internet sector;  China topped the 100 million net users mark circa July 2005, but that is only about 7.5% of China's 1.3 billion population.

Across the board, all the major net players are starting to focus on China. The battle for search is already underway as Google looks to boost its presence.

The last time around, 2001, AOL -- Time Warner's internet division -- partnered with China's largest PC maker, Lenovo.  One would hope they had a game plan going into the union, because the synergy between hardware manufacturer and internet content provider doesn't exactly jump out at me.

This time around, AOL is teaming with the broadband content arm of Shanghai Media Group to launch a free products and service site to establish an initial presence.  Clearly the joint venture here makes sense: content provider <> content manager.

This time around though, AOL will face a lot tougher competition as the field of incumbents is well entrenched.