aboutAI: Our Story
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Our Story |
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A short history of aboutAI.net written by Denis Susac, webmaster and project leader.
(My CV contains more detailed history of our recent projects. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need consulting or development services in the areas of content management, information retrieval, data, text or Web mining, portal construction, etc.)
It all begun in the early 1997, when I stumbled upon the Web site of yet another promising Internet startup. MiningCo.com was hiring "Guides" for various vertical portals gathered under their roof. "We mine the Net so you don't have to" - this catchy concept was remarkably simple, but effective: hundreds of specialized guides were forming their mini-Yahoos, link directories accompanied with newsletters, forums, chat rooms, focused articles, etc. I was working with AI-related technologies at the time, and Artificial Intelligence was a natural choice: unfortunately, that place was already taken. Intelligent agents were another option, so I took a chance there, and in just two or three months my site at http://softwareagents.miningco.com went live.
You really had to be passionate about your topic, producing one weekly article, answering dozens of user questions and maintaining forum discussions and link directories. The hype surrounding intelligent agents was quickly fading, and I was struggling to gather enough material for my site. Things have changed in the late 1998, when I finally got the chance to edit the AI site. In the meantime, MiningCo.com changed its name to About.com, started to organize large-scale PR events in Las Vegas and had almost 1000 topical sites in production. Hopes were high, money was starting to flow, stocks went sky-high right after the IPO. Nothing special, just another case of "E"-uphoria...
About.com had a bunch of great editors, working closely with guides and producing great content. I was able to build a respectable site over the next three years, with thousands of newsletter subscribers, hundreds of high-quality articles and related services. But things have changed soon enough, and we were pressed to write only entry-level articles. I always thought that robo-dogs, virtual pets and Spielberg movies could be interesting to the general AI community only in small doses. More advanced topics quickly became implicitly forbidden, especially after the publishing giant Primedia acquired About.com. AI researchers and enthusiasts simple weren't the kind of audience they tried to target.
Best authors quickly left, and right when I started to think about other options, the management decided to cripple our global taxonomy, eliminating almost 300 sites. They were probably thinking that AI was just another SF topic, so http://ai.about.com vanished in a few days (more precisely, it currently points to the Psychology site). To be honest, they were fair enough to provide me with the access to previously published material, but newsletter subscribers list and similar resources were quickly taken away. But don't get me wrong, working at About.com was a great experience, and I've had a chance to work with so many talented people.
I quickly started working with my development team to produce another valuable AI portal. In the past six months we reviewed numerous portal engines, write a great amount of code, and here you can see the result. We deconstructed Microsoft's .NET IBuySpy portal framework and added a ton of functionality, including Data Mining, Knowledge Management and Information Retrieval technologies. The new design was perfected by our exceptionally talented friend, Tomislav Torjanac. We'll cover the details in the months to come. In the meantime, welcome back to the aboutAI.net, your source of information for all AI-related information on the Web!