Piper Jaffray Senior Analyst Safa Rashtchy, who late last year said Internet ad spending would shoot up to $50 billion in the next 5-6 years, yesterday raised his company's one-year price target for search monolith Google to $600 per share from $445, according to a Reuters report. This price point, reflecting a 50 times price to earnings ratio, would be the highest put forth by any of the 24 brokers that put out model prices on Google's stock. Rashtchy projects that Google will continue its pattern of double digit sales and earnings growth through 2007 and also gain market share. …

As Cnet points out, the pairing of the top dogs--that is, Google's Larry Page and Yahoo's Terry Semel--at the top two Internet search companies as keynote speakers at the world's top show for consumer electronics at first seems a bit odd, doesn't it? These are Internet search companies while this is a consumer electronics show, isn't it? Well, for those of us in the media industry who pay attention to the forward drumbeat of technology and its effect on our industry, this shouldn't be so surprising at all. Every gadget and home electronics device worth its salt these days is …

Hollywood Reporter media and technology columnist Diane Mermigas claims that after taking the media world by surprise in 2005, new media will actually take control in 2006. Traditional media companies struggled last year alongside their leaner and meaner Internet and new-media counterparts to make money from what was and will continue to be a painful--but necessary--transition for them. The difference: this year old-media companies know they have to change or become obsolete in a fast-changing brave new world. But company splits, rabid reshuffling and new partnership deals will not be enough, Mermigas says, because leadership in the new-media world has …

Despite news reports circulating last week (which we didn't hear 'cause we were on holiday) that Wikipedia, the consumer-generated Web encyclopedia, looks set to start selling ads, company founder Jimmy Wales tells ClickZ the opposite. Wales said he was misquoted in a New York Times article published last week with the headline, "Wikipedia Chief Considers Taking Ads." In fact, Wales says the company doesn't need advertising to survive and that selling ads would be a backlash. However, the founder's tone regarding the issue comes across as ambivalent; he says ad-supported content might further the company's "charitable mission" of providing community-generated …

Rupert Murdoch is finding out the hard way that when it comes to running a user- generated content site, you shouldn't mess with your customers. Earlier this month, MySpace users began to notice that any references at all to YouTube, a video sharing site and News Corp. competitor, were being deleted almost as soon as they came up, replaced by a patch of white space. One angry user wrote to a Web log community news site: "They are not admitting to it, and are trying to do this in secret." Soon, many MySpace users started blogging about it on other …

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, tells CNET that the change for Google's users "will be very slight" after the expanded deal with Time Warner's Web portal AOL, meaning there will be no banner ads on the Google home page, and no AOL favoritism in the search results. However, there will be thumbnail-small graphical ads on the home page and, accompanying some text ads, banner and display ads on Google's video and image search results, and greater visibility for Google and its products on AOL's pages. The plans for video remain vague; the companies plan …