Trading volume is brisk and share price is up, just hours ahead of today's Q3 earnings release expected from eBay (EBAY). The earnings call is scheduled for just after today's close, with company guidance suggesting a result of 37 cents per share on revenue of $2.18 billion. Those numbers are slightly off previous year Q3 results of 38 cents per share on revenue of $2.24 billion.

My question is, will eBay still be a buy after the coming earnings release? My answer is, absolutely.

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Something new and something old, eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) the large Internet trading platform competes more each day with Craigslist, who's platform continues to unfold. They are very much the same, and oh so different, too. Craigslist has been resisting becoming eBay in too many ways, yet eBay has gone through the back door to acquiring partial ownership and tracking a competitive threat from the inside.

Being public, eBay must disclose its financial information, which is not true for the private Craigslist. Craigslist is not happy about eBay's ownership position, and for its part eBay has sued Craigslist. It says the board diluted its interest in the popular site by more than 10%, and the two have been trading accusations since.

For most of Craigslist's history there has been pressure to become public or sell itself outright or make the pursuit of profit a higher motive. That has been shunned in favor of slowly building a user friendly and practical Internet information trading platform.

eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) has finally admitted that Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) isn't its friend. This is long overdue.

For months, CEO Meg Whitman and other top eBay executives have used some convoluted logic to argue that Google Checkout doesn't compete with its PayPal service. Google executives also argued not-too-convincingly that there was enough room for both Google Checkout and PayPal in the marketplace.

While it's true that PayPal and Google Checkout aren't exactly alike, they do compete. Everyone knew it but the companies tried to maintain this false image that the Internet is one big politically correct summer camp where everybody is a partner and there are no winners and losers.

That analogy bit the dust Wednesday when Google scheduled an event in Boston to promote Checkout to coincide with a big eBay sellers' event. In response, eBay yanked its search advertising from Google. Remember that eBay has been one of the biggest buyers of search advertising on Google for years.