Deliberate Ambiguity

Bing: An Insider's Perspective

Today, Steve Ballmer announced at AllThingsD that Live Search will relaunching next week as Bing.  Given the amount of speculation on Twitter and that I'll be out next week on vacation when Bing actually launches, I thought I'd type out a few quick thoughts now.  Keep in mind that this is my own perspective and doesn't represent the view of my employer.  In case you don't know, I came to Microsoft Live Search through the acquisition of Powerset last year and work here as a program manager focused on Powerset integration and development.   

First a few comments on functionality and what I like in Bing.

I use Bing (formerly known internally as "Kumo") every day for all of my searches.  When I first joined Live, I used Live.com because I wanted to gain an intimate knowledge of my new product.  I freely admit that I frequently returned to Yahoo or Google when I couldn't find what I wanted.  Over the past six months, Bing relevance has improved noticably and dramatically. Now, I rarely use any other search engine.  When I have trouble finding something on Bing, my searches on competitors are usually just as sparse.

When I do use a competitor, I tend to miss some of the features on Bing (which, unfortunately, you can only experience through screenshots on other blogs until next week).  We've done a killer job designing the left-hand nav (affectionately known as the "ToC" for Table of Contents).  I love the organization of results (I wish it showed up on more queries!).  I also find the Related Searches to be super-useful and, being a frequent searcher (and re-searcher), Search History is literally my bread crumb trail. Another amazing feature is the Best Match, which tries to determine when I'm entering a navigational query (Walmart, Facebook, etc.) and gives me deep links, a search, sometimes a phone number, etc.  There's lots' more in there and I'm sure you'll get to see next week.  I'm excited to see people's feedback on the features that they find the most interesting.

Also, remember that there's a lot of complicated technology under the hood.  It's not just about the interface, it's also about delivering great results.

Which leads me into a few comments for those writing blog posts about Bing and who want to dive into the technology.

Please, please consider writing two blog posts: your initial impressions and your thoughts after you've used Bing as your primary search engine for a minimum of a week.  As per my admonishment in How *not* to rate a search engine, you can't test out a search engine with just a few queries, you have to use it for some period of time to form an informed opinion.  Give us a chance.

Building a search engine is super hard.  We did it from the ground up at Kosmix and the scientists and engineers here at Bing have been working on it for several years.  Awhile back, a friend told me that Amazon estimated it would cost $50-$70M to build a search engine; I think that number is way too low, both in terms of Capex and human capital.  My point here is that it's hard (impossible?) for a startup to challenge Google (cf. Cuil) and even companies with deep pockets are scared of such a huge investment.  Microsoft is committed to Bing and has an incredible architecture for advancing search.

Which brings me to an important point: give the underdog a chance.  I think folks here at Microsoft know that we're coming late to the game, that we're coming from behind, and that we've got some solid competitoin out there.  But competition breeds innovation and innovation is good for consumers.  As Steve Ballmer said today: search could benefit from a good ol' fashioned feature war!

Oh, and for you Powerset fans, there's certainly some Powerset in Bing, but there's a lot more Bing in Bing.  We at Powerset proud to be a part of the Bing team, but most of the credit goes to the incredible team assembled in Redmond.  Watch Powerset's blog next week for more information about some of Powerset's specific contributions.

I'm working for search engine number 4 exactly because I think that search is in its infancy and there's a long way to go.  Try out Bing, send us your feedback and we'll listen.  To me, the launch of Bing as a new Decision Engine today is a huge leap forward, but I'm even more excited about the next 6 months, 12 months, and 2 years.  Hope you hop on board for the journey!

Happy Birthday Powerset.com!

It's hard for me to believe it, but a year ago today, we launched Powerset.com.  Of all the products I've launching in my career, I'm most proud to be a part of the Powerset team. Happy Birthday, Powerset.com!

So, how did it go? 

The launch itself was a resounding success.  Powerlabs and the amazing community (thanks, Powerlabbers!) helped to hone the final product into something highly usable, despite the underlying complex technology. 

Though we mistakenly flipped the switch and went live a few hours earlier than we had planned, the huge engineering effort to ensure launch capacity was worth it: Powerset went down only once for <30 minutes when we got slashdotted.

Press coverage was awesome.  The 30+ press briefings we did prior to the launch helped to calm some of the hype around Powerset ("No, we're not a Google-killer, yes, we have some cool technology, yes, this is a long journey," etc.).  Some of the hype is unavoidable, but I think people realized that we had the seeds of something really cool.

When we started getting real-world queries, we found that users are ready, willing, and able to type in natural language queries.  However, we also discovered that it's really hard to market a Wikipedia search engine to people (lots of people wanted to search for Pizza near their house).  As we predicted, once people had a taste of natural language search, they wanted much, much more.

Then, on July 1, 2008, it was announced that Microsoft had decided to purchase Powerset.

This was an amazing start, but the journey has just begun.  I wrote a post a year ago musing about whether Powerset crossed The Uncanny Valley.  I think it's safe to say that neither Powerset nor anyone after us has been able to create a semantic search experience that meets users' expectations. However, now that we're part of Microsoft, I'm really excited that Powerset will help to transform the Live Search experience.  We've got a lot of things in the pipeline, so keep checking back for more announcements.

Wolfram Alpha: A Marketer's 2 Cents

Wolfram Alpha will be launching on May 18, 2009, almost exactly a year after Powerset launched.  Unlike other big flops launches, I am totally stoked about the Wolfram Alpha launch, especially after reading all of great posts written about pre-demos.  In the spirit of nostalgia for Powerset's launch, I thought I'd toss my hat in a ring (unfortunately never having had a live demo), focusing on Wolfram Alpha's pre-launch from a marketing perspective.

Branding. In launching a new search service, a comparison to Google is inevitable.  We explicitly told reporters that Kosmix and Powerset were not competing with Google, but they cannont resist the siren song of a controversial headline.  Wolfram Alpha is wisely branding themselves as a computation engine, suggesting questions that crunch numbers instead of better search.  Also, despite comparisons to Google, Wolfram Alpha is trying to be humble and remind people that the road to computation is a long journey, not a quick win.  Wolfram's post The Quest for Computable Knowledge: A Longer View sets the right tone in a historical context.

Audience. There have been a lot of complaints that the name "Wolfram Alpha" is too long and complicated.  In demos, they've been showing off chemical formulas, population graphs, and calculus. This will not appeal to my mom.  Instead of going after consumers, they are going after geeks who love data.  Most geeks associate Worlfram with Mathematica (and the ueber-geeks associate him with NKS).  I like the name, for now.

Competitors. Notwithstanding comparisons to Google, I'm surprised that few have compared Wolfram Alpha to True Knowledge, which is currently live and can answer inferential questions like who are queen elizabeth ii's grandchildren and who was the first woman to climb mount everest and what time is it in Boston.  Note that both of these questions require inference, but TK knows about QEII's kids and their kids (and that kid's kids are grandchildren).  Unlike Wolfram Alpha, TK has a system for users to enter and curate information in their database.  If TrueKnowledge can get enough editors, this is potentially a much more flexible system than manually curating government data.  Another obvious competitor is Metaweb's Freebase. It'll be interesting to see who else pops up in this space.

Benefits.  This is where Wolfram Alpha is going to have some problems.  It's just not very often that I have questions about chemical formulas and when I type in "Seattle, WA" the graph of the temperature might be interesting, but probably not what I'm looking for.  What is it that I should use a "computation engine" for?  At least in the short term, they're going to rely on geeks getting lost in all of the cool things that Wolfram Alpha makes possible. 

Scope.  As a corrolary to the above, Wolfram Alpha better do a phenomenal job on day one of explaining what data is availabe and what kind of computations can be done on that data.  If they're smart, they'll have tons of example queries that show off the power of the engine, lots of screencast and tutorials, and maybe even a contest to get users to generate cool queries.  Based on what I've seen, here are a few demos that I'm gonna try (of course I'm going to take my own advice and not rate Wolfram Alpha based on the results):

• Chemical formula of water
• Number of moles in a gallon of water
• What happens when you mix bleach and ammonia?
• What states are in the Pacific Daylight time zone?
• What's the time difference between Tokyo and New York City?
• What animals have a cloven hoof?
• Is it colder in San Francisco or Seattle in May?
• When did the wooly mammoth live?
• What were the top 10 largest cities in the US in 1990?

*waiting with bated breath*

How *not* to rate a search engine

While demoing Live Search at the Web 2.0 Expo, people continually asked the same questions: “What makes Live different?” or “Show me some features that will make me want to switch from my search engine” or the extremely confrontational “Why do you think you’re better than Google?”

My first instinct was to dive in and show people the coolest features in Live Search (e.g., demoing  Virtual Earth with an Xbox controller) or to let them play around with their own queries.

However, given my experience working for several startup search engines, I’ve come to realize that it's extremely difficult to convince someone that you’re better than another engine with words, features, or few carefully chosen queries.

So, after awhile, I started my demos with a caveat about the nature of a search engine: I implored my audience to try out Live Search for a week so that, in the words of the immortal Lavar Burton of Reading Rainbow, “But, you don’t have to take my word for it.”

Is this a cop-out?  Why is demoing search so hard?

Search “Features”

When showing off a new version of Microsoft Word or Typepad or Yahoo Messenger, a good product marketing person will not just demonstrate features, but analyze their audience and demonstrate benefits that help users accomplish specific tasks. (This is just product marketing basics.)

A search engine, by contrast, has an extremely simple interface: you type in some words and hope that the engine will cough up pointers to helpful Web sites or give you a direct answer.  The inner workings of a search engine, i.e. how those results were produced, are completely opaque to the user.  Hundreds of features are used to rank results so that the right Web sites and answers show up on a page when you type in some string of words.  Those features don't surfaces as demonstrable chunks that can be easily summarized or understood.

Common mistakes when evaluating a search solution

 Which brings me to the biggest mistake people make: judging a search engine by typing in a few queries and analyzing the results. There are many interrelated reasons that this methodology fails:

• A few good/bad results don’t mean that all results will be good/bad – even if you try out five searches and all are good, how do you know if your sixth is also going to be good?  That is, since you don’t know what is going on under the hood, you can’t make any predictions about the quality of future results.
• It’s hard to select a representative cross section of queries – people usually try out a few navigational queries, a vanity query, and a few queries that are either damn-near impossible or extremely obscure.  None of these sets represents an accurate cross-section of your monthly query log.
• What you think is “good” may not be good for the majority of users – for navigational queries (e.g. “CNN.com”) the top result is clear.  For more complicated queries, the top results are rarely obvious.
• Queries are out of context – we had this problem at SideStep all of the time.  During usability studies, users who were simply evaluating the look-and-feel of the product and scanning for cheap flights without any end-goal were never as good as users who were actually trying to buy a flight for a real trip.  A search engine should help you complete tasks, not just give you a pretty page or have links that look useful.
• People tend to focus on the first result – some queries just require one result.  But many queries should be judged by the diversity of interesting results.

There are probably countless other mistakes that are made during solo evaluations of search.   Therefore, search engines big and small realize that problems of ranking and relevance – the core of any search project – are solved only by lots and lots and lots of data from lots and lots and lots of people.  To solve this data problem, we need to collect data from real users.  For example, we run many thousands of queries past human judges and look at mountains of click data from the production site.  After applying apply advanced statistical techniques to this data, we get the information we need to create algorithms that turn your few (mispelled) words and turn them into a useful page of results.

As one of my colleagues at Powerset always likes to remind me: this is rocket science.

Demos from the Epic PAWS Meetup

Tonight I’m at a huge PAWS meetup with well over a 100 people (standing room only) here at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View (known to insiders as "SVC").  These are my notes from the presentation, so apologies if they look like a Virginia Woolf novel.

Uptake (Gene McKenna) - Has a vocabulary of travel related terms, sentiment analysis based on types of classes (positive/negative terms for romantic), an ontology (e.g., what does it mean to be kid-friendly?).  Then run reviews through their engine and extract interesting facts.   Indexed over a million products, 20 million opinions, etc.  For hotels, they show snippets of reviews that will be relevant, rather than have the user go through hundreds or thousands of reviews.  For example, a search for family hotels in San Francisco gives you a set of family-friendly hotels with highlights from the reviews. 

Expert Systems (Walter Pezzini) - FY08 $13.5M, profitable and 100+ employees(!!) and based in Italy.  Demo of Cogito Answers, which is answers NL questions from unstructred data (Wikipedia), some structure (eBay), or structured data (American Football DB).  This was developed for a customer and is not live on the Web. First question "who was OJ Simpson's wife?" got an answer from both Wikipedia.  Second question "do you have a Jets keychain for under 105?" gets results from eBay.  Third question: "for which teams did Farve play" went to the American Football DB.  The demo seems to show that Expert Systems can figure out which source to get the data from, but I would have been even more impressed if he asked a question that could have been answered from multiple sources to see how it collated the data.  Someone from the crowd: "Do you need to know the schema of the database?"  Answer: some tools for customers to map tables to concepts.

Freebase (Jason Douglas) - an (awesome) open, editable, free database with about 5M topics in the graph with their relationships.  Using the Metaweb Query Language (MQL), did a mashup with last.fm data + twitter follower data, to determine the most popular band member's name.  He should totally build a Web 2.5 mashup site and start his own company.

zAgile (Andrew Lampitt) - Why semantic Web in the enterprise: heterogeneous, siloed apps + no shared vocabularies + no resuse across apps and processes.  Demonstrates how Wikidsmart (which is the best product name I've seen this millenium) can help to integrate across many different software development apps (version control, bug tracking, project managment, etc.) in a nice Wiki interface.  You can try out their sandbox once you log in.

Zemanta (Bostjan Spetic aka Bos aka Zemanta co-founder) - takes a few lines of text, recognizes what's important, pulls back pictures relevant to the text, suggests links from multiple sources, and other pieces of information. It's easy, just copy some text and try Zemanta here.  Think "research assistant" or "content enhancement."  Obviously sits on a lot of technology to do this, but tries to hide the complexity from the user: "so you and your mother can use it."  All of the processing is done on Zemanta's servers. You can use Zemanta by installing it as a plug-in and it will work in your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Wordpress blog, Typepad blog, etc.  Also has an API that allows you to do Semantic Mashups.  

Noovo (Andrej Babergoj) - Noovo is a recommendation engine in Beta that suggests content and tell you why it recommended it and who recommended it.  You can give items a thumbs up or down. (This was a real demo: one of his friends shared an NC-17 picture with him.  Friggin' awesome.)  Allows you to join groups, connect with your social networks, etc. - things you'd expect in a Web 2.0 recommendation engine. Social graph (who are your friends/colleagues/family) + Activity graph (what you do) + Personal Interests (what you like).  Someone asked a question (which was also on my mind) about how they compare to Twine.  I didn't completely understand the answer =)

Microsoft Research (Bora Beran) - showing off some work done at MSR, specifically in the Technical Computing group.  Showed off a few plug-ins for Microsoft Word.  First, Chem4Word allows you to all sorts of features to add chemicals to Word Docs.  For example, he typed in "water" and got a list of synonyms and was able to insert an dihydrogen monoxide molecule into the document.  Zentity allows you to manage your scholarly work (not using OWL or RDF, but an identity data model) for things like citations and gives you an advanced way to search through the data.  SciScope is (one of) Bora's project, which is an interatcive map with tons of environmental data.  Takes data from multiple data sources, but totally transparent to the user.

One last special mention: I met Guha Jayachandran, who did Folding@Home as his PhD project at Stanford.  He's got a new search engine called Cruxlux which analyzes perspective.  Very excited to see that.

Let me know if there are any errors in my trascriptions.  And follow me on Twitter!

Overview of Semantic Search Engine Panel

As previously reported, I was lucky enough to host a panel at Alternative Search Engine Day last Monday.  I thought I’d type up some of my notes from the panel and talk about what I thought was most interesting.

For the demos, we got a sneak peek into TrueKnowledge, which is still behind a closed beta.  TK currently houses over 106M facts and is constantly growing.  TK does inference, which means that it can derive facts from knowledge it has cataloged and knowledge it has about the world.  For example, TK might not have an explicit fact for Queen Elizabeth II’s grand-daughters, but it knows her children and their children and can derive the fact.  Users can query the system in natural language and, when a fact isn’t returned, can add that knowledge to TK.

Truvert is a vertical search engine for the green market (a popular topic at Alt Search Engine Day) which his built on technology from OrcaTec.  When a user types in an ambiguous term like “palm” into Truevert, the results are centered around “palm oil,” not the PDA.  OrcaTec claims that it can build a vertical with a small training set of a few thousand documents in just a few hours on a single machine.  Their search is based on Yahoo BOSS.

I was especially excited to see TextDigger, which I’d never seen demoed live before.   TD is currently in private beta with about 1000 users and a long waiting list.  Launch is anticipated in Q3 of this year.  TextDigger is meant to be a high-end research tool where users have lot of power over the semantics of their search.  TextDigger shows all of the possible senses of words in a given query and the user can select which sense they really meant, which will filter the search results accordingly.  I found this especially interesting because it’s a feature we always considered at Powerset, but ended up leaving out of the final product because of concerns about confusion of users (and that we thought that the heavy lifting should be done by the engine, not the end user).  I’m really excited to get an invite to the beta and I’m sure I’ll have a more detailed analysis once I get in and play around.

During the Q&A session, a number of interesting topics came up.  Both TextDigger and Truevert both rely on results from a bigger search engine and rerank them based on semantic algorithms.  TrueKnowledge has built their own index of facts, which is focused on structured information as opposed to free text.

When talking about what “semantic search” is defined as, Dr. Musgrove of TextDigger delineated a difference between “soft” and “hard” semantic search (reminiscent of strong vs. weak AI and the hard vs. easy problem of consciousness).  Better query suggestions, similar to what Google recently announced as soft, whereas actually trying to understand queries and read text is hard.  The distinction still isn’t completely clear in my mind, though my instinct suggests that it would be useful to discover.  I’m going to noodle that and see if I can come up with something.

Overall, great panel and I look forward to the upcoming Semantic Demo Session on 4/14 at Microsoft in Mountain View, Web 3.0, and the Semantic Technology Conference.

Semantic Search panel at Alt Searche Engines Day on March 30

Charles Knight of RRW affiliate AltSearchEngines.com is hosting an Alternative Search Engine Day on Monday, March 30 (the day before Web 2.0) at the Interncontinental Hotel in downtown San Francisco.  If you're curious about innovation among smaller players in the search industry or you're just curious and here early for Web 2.0, considering joining us!  Tickets are only $30 in advance, so register now!

I'm hosting a great panel on Semantic Search from 11:00 - 11:45 a.m. with the following panelists:

• Powerset/Live Search, Mark Johnson, Senior Program Manager (Powerset Blog / Powerset Twitter)
• Truevert, Herbert Roitblat, CEO (Truevert Blog / Truevert Twitter)
• TextDigger, Tim Musgrove, CEO (TextDigger Blog / TextDigger Twitter)
• TrueKnowledge, William Tunstall-Pedoe, CEO (TrueKnowledge Blog / TrueKnowledge Twitter)

Each panelist will have about 5 minutes to demo their product and show off their technology, their product, and their user advancements.  After demos, we'll discuss some of the topics below and take questions from the audience.

• Defining "Semantic Search": What is semantic search?  Have we been trained by major search players to have a narrow-minded view of what "search" can mean?  What conditions does a search engine have to satisfy before it can be considered semantic?
• Business-model: As Charles has pointed out, major search engines have ~98% of the market.  Should a smaller player try to find a niche and own it?  What niche could that possibly be, considering users tend to use just a few major search engines?  Is it possible that a small company could rise up and challenge major players with deep pockets?  Is it enough to create a technology demonstration and hope to be gobbled up by a big company?
• User Experience: What sort of features can users expect from semantic search to improve their user experience?  What specific features does your product give to users?
• The Competition: What interesting innovations (other than your own company) have you seen in the past year?  What are you looking forward to this year?

I'll be sure to post my notes from the panel after, so if you have any burning questions about semantic search, drop them in the comments and I'll make sure that we address them.

Look forward to seeing you there!

(And, shameless plug: if you're interested in semantic technology, consider coming to the PAWS Meetup on 4/14: we have 8 semantic technology companies demoing!)

Colliding Worlds in Social Networks

My sister, who works as a manager in a branch bank, reported to me an incident about a recent Facebook update.  Upon coming home from work one Friday, she found that her boyfriend hadn’t taken the garbage out.  The dog had made a mess in the kitchen.  She updated her Facebook status to: “So. Over. It.”  Her boss’s boss noticed this and told my sister’s manager to deal with it on Monday.  Thinking that the update was referring to work, my sister’s boss threatened to write her up.  Luckily, my sister talked her way out of it, but she promptly went and changed her privacy settings on all of her superiors.

Most of the world operates like this.  A friend in Boston who works for EDS has AIM blocked at work and uses his iPhone.  My sister has many sites blocked at work, including Facebook, and uses her Crackberry to update her status.  Obviously some of these walls will fall as these tools become more ingrained into our society.  But, most modern social networking tools cause a collion of worlds: family meets friends meet work, and sometimes it can get messy.

My sister’s experience reminded me that we live in an odd world in the Valley.  Given the nature of my job, I’m actually encouraged to use social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter while at work: my mastery of “social media” is just part of my duties.  Instant messaging is an application I just couldn’t live without, since it’s one of the primary ways I communicate with developers.  “Surfing the Web” isn’t playing around, it’s using modern tools to get our jobs done.

But what happens when things go awry?  Innocuous messages like my sister’s can be construed the wrong way.   Friends can make jokes on your Facebook status that aren’t appropriate for others to see.  You relationship status becomes water cooler discussion.  Your friends may post damning information about you.  Drunk/stoned/etc. Twitter updates at 3:00 a.m. on Saturday morning are self-explanatory.  Employees with mistakenly leak things and complain about work.  This list could continue ad infinitum.

At first blush, an easy solution might be to prevent worlds from colliding.  If we give users powerful privacy mechanisms to allow them to manually separate their worlds, then they won’t have to worry about collisions.  I think this is faulty in multiple respects.  First, these mechanisms are rarely easy to use and therefore rarely used.  More importantly, privacy is eroding because of our willingness to share personal information.   However, it’s not just that we don’t care, I think we get serendipitous value from social media tools exactly because we don’t necessarily know who is reading our stuff.  Ever tweet something and get an insightful response from someone you didn’t know?  Or post that you’re visiting an obscure city and get an e-mail from a friend you barely knew in high school?   We share freely both because we want our friends to know and we believe that there are friends beyond our immediate network willing to reach out to us.

So, what’s gotta change?  Will employees become more conscious of what they are posting or will employers have to become more tolerant of their employees having lives outside of work?   Certainly, as more people become connected via social media, users will temper what they say and do some amount of self-policing and self-censorship.  However, I believe that the bigger change needs to come from employers.  Employees will have a life outside of work that includes mistakes, sex, anger, occasional vitriol towards their employer, drugs, and breakups.  And, some of the best employees will likely engage in the “worst” behavior.  I’m lucky that I happen to work for Microsoft, a company that values diversity among its employees and doesn’t give a hoot that I post much of my life on my Twitterstream, some of it funny, some of it enlightening, and some of it unsavory.  Let’s hope that the rest of the world catches up before social media is ruined by fear of people to post their raw thoughts.

(n.b., I don’t think that people should post anything on Twitter and Facebook.  On the contrary, I think that people will be smart about policing themselves.  What I care about is that employers take a very liberal stance and realize that employees who think and express themselves are more valuable than employees that try to do everything by the book, especially when the book is outdated.)

My Wellsphere saga and the recent acquisition

I was horrified to learn this week that Wellsphere was bought by HealthCentral.  My only consolation is the possibility that it was a fire sale and the founders made no money.  Rumor has it that Wellsphere was shopping around for funding and couldn't raise capital, so maybe Wellsphere had to sell for cost.  Why am I so interested in a little podunk company?  Read on. . .

My history with Wellsphere goes way back.  I did consulting for them back in the Summer of '06, before they had a Web site.  At the time, they seemed like a good company with a good mission and their CEO/co-founder, Ron Gutman, convinced me to leave my job and join Wellsphere full-time.  That guy is a real charmer, at least up front.

Upon arriving at Wellsphere, I realized that there were problems much larger than I had gathered from my position as a consultant.  Work hours were ridiculous for everyone in the company: 7 days a week and often greater than 12 hours a day.  I don't mind working hard, but it seemed like we were working without a clear goal, always brainstorming and changing directions.  Then, I realized that we had a pending product launch (with a constantly moving launch date), without any solid requirements, and a small consulting team working half time.  I picked up the pieces, started to write requirements, hired more consultants, made a plan, and got things on track.  However, Ron kept pushing ridiculous, unreasonable schedules and requirements, and I got more and more frustrated.  Even though I was working for a company that touted "wellness" as its foundation, I was overworked, not getting enough sleep, highly stressed, and losing confidence that we'd release a product that I'd be proud of.

I knew that there were some former employees of Wellsphere that had been around while I was consulting.  Shortly before I joined, Ron told me that they were fired because they weren't team players.  At the end of my first month, I emailed one of the former employees out of desperation to figure out what was really going on.  What I learned was quite the opposite story from what I had been told by Wellsphere.

The entire engineering team, consisting of 4 employees, quit about 3 weeks before I joined.  In addition to the engineers, there were another dozen employees that had formerly worked for the company and quit.  Keep in mind that, when I worked at Wellsphere, there were only 6 full-time employees!  This place went through employees like Kleenex during flu season.

After meeting with the group of former employees and hearing their poor treatment, long hours, unrealistic deadlines, blah blah blah, I realized that my experience was not isolated, but rather systematic, unscrupulous behavior by the management team.  I've personally met over two dozen former employees and consultants of Wellsphere who want nothing to do with the company or Ron Gutman.  It's ironic that a company founded on health and wellness treats its employees so poorly. 

So, I made the difficult decision to quit Wellsphere, even though I didn't have another job and I was leaving a company just a few weeks before the Web site launched.

The first iteration of Wellsphere.com launched in January '07 and pretty much flopped. For some classic articles from that period, check out the series at Uncov, the comments in the TechCrunch article, and the creepy video of Ron in the GigaOm article.

Not surprisingly, the acquisition of Wellsphere is turning out people in droves who felt like they they were bamboozled.  Basically, Wellsphere has a "network" of bloggers, which they seem to have created by flattering bloggers with long letters, appropriating their content, and not giving the bloggers anything in return (sounds much like my employment experience).  To be fair to Wellsphere, it's all documented in their ToS, but the process sounded shady.  Given my experience with them, it's par for the course.

I'm going to keep a list of some of the better posts about the situation, and will update this regularly.  If you have a gripe, leave it in the comments, Twitter with #wellsphere, or drop me an e-mail.

• Health bloggers bite back as Wellsphere sells on posts provided for free - a good summary post with links to other important blog posts
• How the health blogosphere was scammed - a great post with e-mails from Wellsphere and snippets from their ToS
• All is not Well(sphere) - a personal commentary from a blogger who feels they were scammed
• The Wellsphere blogging controversy - a great explanation of the psychology behind Wellsphere
• My email to Wellsphere and HealthCentral - an open letter to the companies expressing her concern with Wellsphere's program
• Will Health Bloggers Foil the Acquisition of Wellsphere by HealthCentral - an incisive post that suggests that bloggers may scuttle the deal (the comments for this one are very interesting)
• Wellsphere scandal and blog network scam - suggests that people should request a Google penalty at Wellsphere for shady business practices
• New Wellsphere badges - a blogger made some new badges for Wellsphere.  I included one in this post.
• Liars go to Hell.  I'm talking to you Wellsphere - accuses Wellsphere of stealing her blog's content and demands a public apology
• #wellsphere on Twitter - to follow the latest conversations.  It tends to light up like a Christmas Tree. Haha.

Can't wait to hear from people!  I'm sure that this company has left a trail of debris in their few years of existence.  I can only hope that HealthCentral will realize that they've bought a house of cards built by a few charlatans and will renege on their offer to buy.

Descartes said interesting things other than "Cogito, ergo sum"

Through SFSU's College of Extended Learning and the grace of Professor Sowaal, I found a spot in Phil 770-03, a seminar on Descartes.  I'm so excited to be back in school!

Whenever I have time after class, I've decided to transcribe some of my notes and thoughts to paper.  I'll also be posting my papers on here, in case there was any doubt that I am a true philosophygeek.

My knowledge of Descartes comes mainly from my (analytic) epistemology classes, debates over the mind-body problem, and Rorty's scathing criticism, all focused on around Descartes famous statement: Cogito, ergo sum. Since Professor Sowaal is a Descartes scholar, she's teaching the class by focusing on Descartes other texts and contributions, and only then tackling The Meditations.

I'm excited about seeing Descartes from this different lens.  One of the biggest challenges in philosophy can be to give a generous reading to a philosophy that you find distasteful, untenable, or even illogical.  Anyone can bring down a weak argument, but it takes a great deal of skill to repair a broken argument and make it palatable for modern sensibilities.  Professor Sowaal made an astute observation that there's a common trope in modern thought: "Descares said these very interesting, but stupid things, and this is why he is wrong."  My challenge in this class will be to figure out how to preserve the interesting and correct the "stupid."

Much of the class we spent discussing the problem of universals (oddly enough, I just finished reading Quine's smackdown of the issue, in Two Dogmas of Empiricism).  Roughly, the problem questions the difference between the abstract concept of "computer" and a particular computer, like the one I'm typing on.  The rationalists (like Descartes and Plato) belived in the supremecy of universals, and used those to explain the variety of particulars.  That is, how do we go from the form of "computer" to a bunch of things we agree are computers.   On the other hand, the empiricists (Locke, Hume, et al.) try to explain how universals provide some kind of unity for a bunch of similar, but non-identical particulars.  That is, how is it that we have a bunch of machines called "computers" that somehow get lumped into a concept of "computer." 

From our modern perspective, this "problem" might seem ridiculous at first blush.  Most everyone these days is an empiricist and language issues center around problems of meaning and representation, not about the existence of extra-sensory universals.

We read an excellent paper by Alan Nelson called The Rationalist Impulse to help explain the stance of the rationalists.  First, he notes that rationalists have a different methodology: whereas empiricists use sensory perception as a primary, a rationalist must take a student through a thought experiment to arrive at their conclusions.  Thus, even though universals are more primary to the rationalist, the universals are not necessarily easy to see.  As an example, if one didn't know anything about music or trained in a different school of tonality, one might think that a Beethoven symphony is cacophonous.  Second, he points out that empiricists still have a lacuna to cross: they must be able to explain their more abstract notions.  Even Hume, the father of empiricism, couldn't say anything more about the problem of induction than "habit." 

I'll be posting a paper later this week on Daniel Garber's article, Descartes against His Teachers: The Refutation of Hylomorphism.  That should be interesting, since I haven't written a real philosophy paper in quite some time!