In April, Expedia proposed a plan that would break the business into two public companies.

One would be a travel agency, focused on selling air, hotel and car rentals, and the other would be TripAdvisor, the travel reviews site that operates in 27 countries and 19 languages.

The deal is expected to close on or about Dec. 20, including a one-for-two reverse stock split immediately prior to the spin-off. Expedia will trade under the symbol EXPE and TripAdvisor will trade under TRIP.

Today, the company filed a presentation with the Securities & Exchange Commission detailing Expedia’s standalone growth prospects. The case will be an important one to make given that TripAdvisor is often seen as the more attractive of the two companies.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company plans to present the slides to various investors and analysts over the next two-and-a-half months.

In the presentation, Expedia lists three major growth opportunities: International expansion, especially in Asia; a greater concentration on hotel bookings, which have higher margins than airplane tickets; and new distribution platforms, such as cellphones and tablets.

Expedia is a traditional travel agency that collects fees when an airfare or hotel room is booked. Meanwhile, TripAdvisor, which aggregates user-generated reviews, produces revenue from advertising, as well as fees when users book through other sites, such as Priceline or Orbitz.

In the quarter ended in September, TripAdvisor’s revenue jumped by 30 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, Expedia’s revenues rose only 14 percent.

Additionally, the company is breaking up as it faces increasing competition from Google, which has started integrating the technology of ITA, a travel software company it acquired, into its search results.

Expedia’s stock today is trading at $28.65, up 61 cents.

In a research note, Jefferies analyst Youssef Squali said that Google stands to benefit from increased search-ad spending among marketers and an updated product-search feature that lets Web users more easily see pictures and reviews of items.

“The integration of search, user-generated content, comparison shopping, YouTube, location information and mobile shows the impressive span of Google’s product portfolio that the company can leverage to drive traffic for its e-commerce customers and advertisers,” Mr. Squali wrote.

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The list referred to user-generated content on a section of Yahoo China’s Web site called “Yahoo Space,” which is not currently in operation. But a subsequent notice released today by the center said remnants of the “vulgar” content from Yahoo Space could still be found in other parts of Yahoo’s portal.

The Web sites “didn’t continue to follow the government’s call to effectively crack down on vulgar content and information on the Internet, and relaxed supervision of their Web sites, which ultimately led to the appearance of a lot of vulgar content, which is against social morals and does harm to the physical and mental health of the youth,” the center said in a notice. “Such behavior…has led to the anger of our public and should be strongly condemned.”

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Who? I hadn’t heard of Kutiman until today, either. But turns out he’s an Israeli musician who’s getting lots of praise this week for creating the best video of the year–using other people’s YouTube clips.

Check out “Mother Of All Funk Chords”–the first of seven songs Kutiman has made using audio and video he found on Google’s (GOOG) video site. If you’re one of the people who puts great stock in the promise of user-generated content, here’s your best-case scenario:

And here’s Kutiman himself, explaining (sort of) how he does it.

How cool is that? Also, how legal? Not sure about the second question.

I’m pretty sure that Kutiman didn’t get permission from anyone he sampled, and I’m assuming that anyone whom Kutiman sampled could complain to Google and try to get the clip edited or taken down.

Perhaps that’s already happened. Kutiman provides an extensive list of links explaining where he found the stuff on YouTube, and one of those links already leads to a dead clip (see complete list at the end of this post).

On the other hand, it’s not as if he’s sampling stuff owned by the big labels. I’m pretty sure most of the folks he’s included in this mashup and the others he made are going to be ecstatic.

Like “stringquartet,” who left this comment on Kutiman’s video after learning his guitar solo is featured: “I just found out about this tonight. Thank you for making this video! (I’m the guy soloing at 1:38) THANK YOU! this was done so creatively.”

Agreed! More, please.

Here’s the source material list:

miquelsi, theremin

TheHitman1990 (Bernard “Pretty” Purdie clip), drums

MarloweDK,bass, bass2

rockongoodpeople, funk guitar

stringquartet (Eric), guitar solo

meewsic (Brian Fox), blues harp and vocals

originalguitarlesson (BJ Cunningham), rock guitar

shellman1982 (Eric Budd), contrabass trombone

expertvillage, trombone, baritone horn,rhodes piano

melbookermusic, mute guitar

guille432, tenor saxophone

[removed], guitar bridge

haho01, guitar band

Matyooo, hammond

miracleministries, orange team cheer

Csuperjo1 (Jimmy Persad clip), crazy sax

JeffEdwards, theremin sex

Imitationn*gger (Richard Barret clip), guitar licks

huwdann (Leon), trumpet kid

Another day, another article about how social-networking advertising has a steep uphill ride to get to any kind of decent pinnacle of profitability.

This time, it’s the New York Times’s Digital Domain columnist Randall Stross weighing in yesterday on the experiments going on between Facebook and the world’s largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble (PG).

Unfortunately, Stross did not appear to actually talk much to either party about the specific results, except to make his own nonscientific determination of two seemingly lackluster advertising efforts around P&G’s Tide and Crest brands on Facebook.

Thus, to my mind, the article represents the high-water mark of the Facebook-Is-Dead theme. This is characterized by the theme of the hot social-networking site running out of money and doing down rounds from its once-touted $15 billion valuation (a valuation that was fiction then and only more so in this weak economic environment).

That plot was, of course, preceded by the Facebook-Is-Immortal story, in which the start-up could do no wrong.

BoomTown did not buy the latter, as readers of this column will recall. But I certainly don’t accept the former either.

Instead, hopefully, we can now reset all our expectations and keep it simple: Facebook has impressive growth and terrific products, which everyone should admire.

Now, it and other sites like it have to come up with innovative ways to monetize their services.

And that is not impossible, as the article in the Times–which would surely trade Facebook’s challenges for its own in the ad market, I would guess–insinuates.

How does it arrive at this conclusion?

By referencing a sizzling quote last month by Ted McConnell, manager of interactive marketing and innovation at P&G, of course, who said at a conference: “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads in Facebook” and also, “I don’t want to be best friends with a brand…It’s just stuff.”

Along with this less-than-smoking gun, the article also lists all the alleged problems of advertising in a social-networking environment, most of which are very old news for anyone paying even the slightest attention over the last year.

To wit: People on social networks like to hang with friends rather than brands; ads on member homepages are cheap, but no one looks at them anyway; to get people to pay attention, you need to fork over too much or do dumb prize contests; consumers are not interested in being brand ambassadors; and, of course, advertisers don’t like putting their brands next to possibly nutty user-generated content.

While a P&G spokesperson later told the Times it was committed to its “strong” Facebook relationship, Stross ended with this zinger: “When Facebook convinces advertisers to stage Super Bowl-sized entertainment every day, its future will be assured.”

Thanks for the heads-up, except the premise could not be further from what it will likely take for the Facebooks of the world to succeed.

Rather than think on these kinds of mass terms, the ad industry is going to have to get used to a much different paradigm if it wants to reach young consumers. It is a Twittery, SMS-rich, Super-Poking world, in which the message will have to be drastically changed to work.

And it is incumbent on Facebook and the ad industry to come up with new kinds of ad formats–yet uninvented–and new means of engagement.

Now, Facebook–which never met a buzzword it did not trot out too early–is using this “engagement” term to try to excite advertisers, which it should not do before such a thing actually works.

Instead, it has to slowly and quietly make inroads on a variety of fronts, much as Google (GOOG) did way back when it was not profitable, and then tout the results.

Until Facebook does that, though, expect more of the same it-won’t-work mentality across the landscape.

That is, until it does work, of course.