I was invited to speak at Google on some of the work I’ve done at Edmunds. The crowd was engaged and the questions were great. It’s very humbling to be surrounded by really smart people that like what you do.
Update Feb 13, 2011: Great feedback on the YouTube page. Please join in the conversation 🙂
Ismail Elshareef 
Ismail, this is good stuff, thank you for posting it.
It seems like the “black box” method you have in place for ads works fine on doubleclick ads, but unless I’ve misunderstood, it’s not the one-size-fits-all solution I hoped for. Adbrite ads utilize a document.write (like doubleclick); however, the js code then writes an iframe to the document, and then sets the src of the iframe in a later piece of js code. This would be fine, except Firefox (or any mozilla browser) has an unfixed bug (discovered in 2004) where moving an iframe removes all of its contents. Any ideas on a way around this?
Also, you mentioned in your tech-talk that when moving the element containing the ad, you’re moving the ‘-root’, when in fact, the code on edmunds.com is moving the ‘-cache’ and then removing the display style. It’s a small thing, and it does work as-is, but a lot of work was done to get away from “as-is”, so I wanted to let you know of that discrepancy. The easy “fix” is obviously changing the code to move the rt instead of the src var (and then get rid of the line that removes the display style), but you could also leave that piece as-is and just remove the ‘-root’ element entirely in the ad containers (no point wasting DOM elements).
-Thad Miller
Hi Thad,
Thanks for the feedback.
You are absolutely correct. The solution we devised worked great for us precisely because we “only” use doubleclick ads. We haven’t had the chance to look into the other ad networks to see how they fare on this system, but would love to collaborate on that.
I like your alternative solution and I think it’s cleaner. I’ll give it a whirl 🙂
Thanks again for the feedback!
Cheers,
Ismail