[OSM-talk] Advertising on OSM?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 07:11:31PM +0100, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Is there any way (with AJAX?) we could present "Link??ping" in text 
> in that HTML page, and make that text change as the user zooms and 
> pans?  Perhaps a simple HTML reload with new static text after a 
> certain distance of pan&zoom and some delay?

I think the first thing to determine would be whether "with ajax" would
help Google in any case. I'm not sure that Google would check the page
after the ajax was loaded, or even how it determines what part of the
page it communicates to the ad server. It doesn't make sense to go
through this trouble if it turns out that Google won't see the
information anyway.

There are a couple of pathways to follow:
 * If Google won't see dynamic content, then the page itself would need
   to look this information up in the database: that is, make the
   index.html be dynamically generated on the server side, rather than
   on the client side.
 * If it does, then when the map loads, do a geographic query to a
   database with placenames, similar to the attribute-information clicky
   things on http://labs.metacarta.com/osm/

> Even adding a static paragraph of text in the box to the left 
> saying that "with data from a GPS satellite navigation receiver 
> and some time, you can help us extend this map" would bring more 
> ads about GPS receivers, which *are* relevant to many of our 
> users.

Agreed.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta