Sunday, January 17, 2010

Deploying Adsense on GWT

I posted this comment on GWT Google Groups discussions http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit/browse_thread/thread/362aee089f767f1f:

Twenty years ago, someone once told me that doing business in China is like having the rules changed in the middle of a ball game.

Unlike China, Japanese management rewards you for highlighting ambiguities in instructions and policies. Japanese management takes pains to ensure you are well aware of your constraints and objectives. With the exception of Japanese corporate culture, far-east Asian management practices is rampantly management-by-silence (MBS) as opposed to management-by-objectives(MBO). MBS is a very formidable and intimidating control methodology exerted by management thro ambiguity.

The way MBS works is by management giving a set of thoroughly thought out instructions and policies. It is so thoroughly thought out and perfected that any questions and request for further clarification is met with glaring-eyed haughtiness or deer-in-the-headlights stare. It is like Karl Marx is god-perfect but Mohamed, Moses or Jesus is not, so if you are intelligent enough and qualified for the job, don't ask anymore questions about what has already been clearly laid out. I wonder if MBS is a cultural artefact perfected thro millenia or a control technique perfected thro decades of socialism and communism. MBS is also deliberately deployed as a means of population and policy control. Here is a set of complete instructions - go figure it out yourself and pleasure us.

So, after a number of years of having set-up shop in China, has Google learned the formidability of MBS too? I hope not.

But I can't help being in deja vu all over again when I read so many requests for clarification of deploying adsense on GWT framework, Google has but projected a wall-of-silence.

Like Google's presence in China, we GWT developers are an honest lot hoping to do as little or no evil but as much good as possible. We are not out to defraud Google and understand the need to ensure adsense advertisers get as much value as possible and we work to ensure that happens in our pages.

However, to date, I have searched and googled and binged and yahooed and have not been able to find a clear cut policy on how we could deploy adsense on GWT generated pages. There are suggestions though from developers experienced in GWT, some with cock-sure confidence that they are practising what-is-acceptable-to-Google and some with horror stories of having no blipping idea why their account has been disabled.

There has been, to date, no GWT API for embedding adsense.

Management-by-silence? I hope not.

Rather, I hope that it is the case of Google being so swamped with work that it has yet found human resources to address this issue. If this is the case, Google had better put this issue on top priority even if it competes with ChromeOS or Nexus for priorities because adsense is your bread-and-butter. You cannot advise us not to use GWT if we hope to deploy adsense because GWT is such an incredibly beautiful and work-saving framework that I cannot pull myself away from it.