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I am Joannes Vermorel, founder at Lokad. I am also an engineer from the Corps des Mines who initially graduated from the ENS.

I have been passionate about computer science, software matters and data mining for almost two decades. (RSS - ATOM)

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Sunday
Oct262008

Google sites is a great product to increase productivity of businesses of any size. At Lokad, one feature that I am really missing from Google Sites is the ability the embed clean mathematical formula in regular web pages.

Actually, a simple and yet very practical way of achieving a decent mathematical display consists of using a JavaScript ASCII Maths to MathML converter. Yet, Google Sites does not support direct 3rd party script inclusion either (which is probably on of the most painful limitation of Google Sites, but I digress).

Thus, I have decided to spend some time toying with the Google Gadgets to figure out if it was possible to circumvent this limitation through widgets. The resulting gadget can be found here. See also the screenshot below.

The syntax is identical the one of AsciiMathML. Enjoy.

Known limitations:

• Works poorly with Internet Explorer. Since MathML is not natively supported, you need a MathML addon (it's free though).

• Gadget preferences can't be changed in syndicated environment such as Google Sites. Which means that you have to edit first the page in Google Sites if you want the change made to the gadget to be persistent.
Friday
Nov162007

Google has not one web analytics system, but two of them, namely Google Analytics and Google Adwords. For the average webmaster, this situation is quite a pain, because most of the tracking code must be duplicated. To make the situation worse, Google Adwords does not support any straightforward solution to track file downloads.

For the sake of my own μISV, I have designed the following script that enables both Analytics and Adwords tracking in a single function.

// Tracking.js - Joannes Vermorel, Lokad.com, 2007function dhtmlLoadScript(url){   var e = document.createElement("script");   e.src = url;   e.type="text/javascript";   document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(e);}function lokadTracker(path){   urchinTracker(path);   google_conversion_id = 10683XXXX; // use your own ID here   google_conversion_language = "en_US";   google_conversion_format = "1";   google_conversion_color = "FFFFFF";   if (1) {       google_conversion_value = 1;   }   google_conversion_label = "pageview";   dhtmlLoadScript('http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion.js');}

<a onclick="lokadTracker('/Foo.zip')" href="Foo.zip" > Foo <a>
Sunday
Jan072007

I have been using AdWords for quite a time, having setup ad campaign both for PeopleWords.com (freelance translation marketplace) and for Lokad.com (business time-series forecasting). And, being both a AdWords consumer (yes I do click on ads) and an AdWords publisher, I must say it’s quite surprising to see a company weighting hundred billions of dollars, with a business so crippled with long-lasting intrinsic issues. Please note that this post is not a complaint against Google, they are quite good at what they are doing; my point is that the AdWords business model is really weak against adversarial behaviors.

First, let me clarify what I mean by “adversarial behavior” here. Put very simply, it’s a situation where an actor (can be a company, an individual) does not play by the rules (can be the laws, can be ethics, can be traditions) and attempts to exploit system weaknesses for its own profit with no overall benefits for the society as a whole. I would oppose this behavior to a “constructive behavior” where an actor attempts to make profits by building wealth with a positive overall benefit for the society.

Typical adversarial behaviors includes stealing, cheating, lying. To avoid those issues, most modern societies have laws to fight those behaviors. On the web, the situation gets more complicated. Not because law does not apply to the internet (which is totally untrue) but because laws gets really complicated to enforces. For example, if you’re caught stealing $10000 to your neighbor, you’re in trouble. But what happen if you’re caught stealing$0.001 to 1,000,000 people from 30 countries over the worlds? Well most probably nothing is going to happen, because nobody is going to complain for 0.1cent.

Such situation is precisely what is causing spam. There are a lot of spammers; the impact of each spammer is low on the global scale, but all together the spammers are a real pain for everybody. E-mail as it has been designed several decades ago is super weak against adversarial behaviors. Yet, also the problem is very well known, it’s still quite easy to mess up, see the Coding Horror story about trackbacks .

It has been quite a lot introduction, but the point I will defend here is that AdWords are almost as broken as the e-mail system to fight adversarial behaviors. Let’s review what I get for “open source ecommerce”, I have pasted below the result obtained at 2007-01-07

 Sponsored Links Ecommerce Open Source Open an ecommerce website or an eshop. Try free! storefront.homestead.com Open Source Ecommerce 1000’s of Great Programmers Bidding Fast & Simple Project Outsourcing. www.GetACoder.com Open Source Ecommerce Find the Top Links on Open Source Ecommerce www.linx-best.com Open Source Ecommerce Open Source Ecommerce? Get More Helpful Free Info Here. yoursources.info

Ok, what’s wrong with this listing? Actually the first result is just a blatant lie, HomeStead.com is absolutely not featuring any open source solution (just check their web site if you do not believe me). Well, try to do that on a National TV show, and I am pretty sure that you get a class action the next morning. The second ads, for GetACoder.com, is also a lie but I would say that it’s lesser lie since it can be argued that nothing prevents you to find freelancers to customize an open source ecommerce application. Google can’t be accused of willingly carrying lies, certainly they do not. Yet, they can discard their responsibility. Both Homestead.com and GetACoder.com are lying here, but their behavior is not totally adversarial, they do both provide added-value solutions for their customers.

The two next results are more subtile but also more perverted. Those two links, Linx-best.com and Yoursources.info are not real website but just a super aggregation of advertising links. Yes, they do not feature any content, they just gather a huge amount of sponsored links into a self generated web directory (I suspect the directory architecture to be actually nothing more than the Dmoz.org directory itself). Actually, what ever link you click in those websites is a sponsored link. I guess that the business idea is to buy cheap Ads from Google (notice that they are not the top results) and to sell random clicks from lost web visitor that happen to get to their website.Those trash websites represent a very significant percentage of the Google AdWords results (I would be on 20%).

Just for fun, let’s see what we get for “make money fast” on Google (results obtained 2007-01-05). Note that the results are split in two sections, the first section being displayed before the actual search results, the second section being displayed on the side at the right of the search results.

Make Money Fast

www.eutradeltd.com/ 0.3% up to 4.5 % daily. Risk Free Short and Long Term Investments

 Sponsored Links www.$3500weekly.com Learn to be a super affiliate Better Quit yr day job. It works! www.3500weekly.com Want to Make a Fortune? Make$55,000 to 1,000,000 a Year! Guaranteed success! - \$49 www.club-fortune.com Fast money work at home Ultimate wealth package try your luck and make1000’s ragstoriches.com NETWORK MARKETERS WANTED JOIN NOW FOR ENDLESS OPPORTUNITIES GROUND FLOOR COMPANY www.trilogyrx.com/essentials Sharemoney Investing up to 385% return for 7 days real short plan investment sharemoney.net Make Money Online Secrets To Make Money Online Revealed In Ebook. Free Download. TurboChargedInternetMarketing.com Make Money Online Today? You can once you know this secret Free audio shows how to get started www.secretofmakingmoney.com

Well, I am quite astonished that Google put an ad titled “Make Money Fast”. To the people of marketing dpt. of Google Inc: Under-promise and over-deliver! and Don’t be evil!, anybody remember? Frankly, I will not even bother to review those links, they are all crap.As a conclusion, please don’t get me wrong, this post is not a Google bashing. Any company that will go in this direction (online automated Ad marketplace) will encounter the exact same problems. The “naive” technical solution (i.e. AdWords in its present state) is directly leading to this situation. Also no laws and no regulations will solve this situation. IANAL, but in France, I am pretty sure that there are enough laws to condemn every advertisers listed in this post.