People ask whether I ever plan to monetise disassociated, and if so, whether I’d use Google Adsense as part of a money making strategy.

The answer to the first question is yes. In fact the site has been partially “monetised” for sometime, by way of Amazon Affiliate ads, and “featured links”, in the right hand hand column, for example. Other ideas are in the pipeline.

As to Google Adsense though. Despite the success some bloggers enjoy with what is probably the web’s most popular revenue generating program, I have a couple of reservations about using Adsense here.

Though I am no expert, it is my understanding Adsense works best in what I call a “contextual environment”.

For example another blog of mine, The InterChange Desk, which is a career change resource, carries Adsense, and the ads generally appear to be of a career related nature. Or at least whenever I see them anyway.

The content here at disassociated is a little more varied however, so I’m not sure what what sort of ads would be served, and whether they’d be of sufficient relevance that a reader would be interested enough to visit any given advertiser.

Perhaps my real bugbear with Adsense though is the way it generates code that is not standards compliant.

Code that is not compliant has the potential to break in some browsers, or not render properly in other devices (for instance mobile phones or screen or braille readers) that some people use to access the internet.

To help me ensure disassociated’s XHTML markup, or code, is correct, I use HTML Validator a Firefox extension which instantly tells me whether any web page here, or that I visit elsewhere, validates or not.

If a page validates to the standard it is coded to, as is the case with disassociated in the above screen shot, then HTML Validator displays a green tick icon in the status bar of Firefox.

However the story is different for The InterChange Desk though, as the red cross icon attests.

Double clicking on the icon displays further information about the validation error, which in the case of the following screen shot, indicates the error is solely a result of the Google Adsense code!

I have seen some discussion about the validation errors produced by Adsense and other PPC programs before, but the consensus overwhelmingly appears to be “who cares?” Adsense publishers cannot change the code, so what are they meant to do about it anyway?

What surprises me though is the fact Google generates non compliant code in the first place.

A company Google’s size would surely have the resources to go about producing code that was up to the specification. If there “technical impediments” of some sort preventing them from doing so, I’d be interested to know what they are.