Update (August 2007): These are all off the site.

Those of you who are attentive may have noticed a couple things about my blog. First, there's the fact that I have placed google adsense on various pages on my blog. Also, I'm using google analytics to monitor how people are reaching this site and what they're doing when they are here.

Both of these technologies creep me out. In my opinion, they are both somewhere between a threat to privacy to an obnoxious invasion. Both are closed source, and google has become the overwhelming market leader for both contextual text ad publishing as well as google analytics.

Why have I used them?

In short, I was curious, and needed to know what these products are and how to use them in order to compete effectively as a web developer. These are the tools that bosses and folks love, and it's easy to see why: many sites are looking to monetize their traffic, and google adsense helps people to do that. All sites would benefit from better understanding how their users use the site. In the offshoot of a chance that I ever actually get a check from the google ads, it will help me to defray operating costs of this blog (although I could probably just solicit donations... to each their own)

With regards to google analytics, so far I don't really like the tool. Yes, it's more fancy than standard log analysis. But it doesn't seem to be doing anything overly complex, so I have to wonder - can't we build an open source tool to do the same?

While we're at it, perhaps we should work on open source tools to replace Google Adwords - sure, Adwords and the market that google has created work well, but other networks of sites may wish to use the technology for their own needs (with perhaps an entirely different model of compensation). And then perhaps go after Google Search itself?

If anyone knows anything like Google Analytics that's free, let me know. If not, I might just write something up myself. It shouldn't this be hard to get good statistics!

In the mean time, I highly suggest the NoScript firefox plugin, in order to block the obnoxious javascript on sites such as mine. I view my site and similar sites without loading ads or triggering urchinTracker, and you can (dare I say, should!) too.