creator of Optimoz '01, ye olde skool blogger '97.
by day Product @ Quora / Poe. on the side Psychodeli and iBlipper.
- 1988: Learns there are some things you can't unsee, given
alt.Usenet newsgroups. - 1995: First webmaster gig, generated so many leads sales couldn't keep up.
- 1999: moved to Silicon Valley for the dot-com crash
- Paper: Personalized Search (defined personalization as a spectrum of individualization vs contextualization )
- 2000: Optimoz — mouse gestures for Firefox. Douglas Engelbart (inventor of the mouse) weighed in, and the feature gap with Opera was closed.
- 2001: Lucidity — open sourced "mouse miles" tracking before in-page analytics was a thing.
- 2003: MS Human Factors at Clemson — Award-winning research, startup failed to launch.
- Paper: Uzilla: A new tool for Web usability testing (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 2003) plus open source tools for card sorting and webpage heuristic review lost to the demise of mozdev.org.
- Paper: A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator (Journal of Digital Information, 2004) — mapping traditional hypertext principles to the web of the time, envisioning blogs as the foundation for universal personal knowledge management.
- 2004: Bing (Microsoft) — OG AI Evaluation PM in the quest to catch Google.
- 2007: Scrutinizer — vision-simulating browser with Adobe Air real time rendering
- 2016: Photoshop Discover Panel — search, documented as "in-app contextual help" for 30M+ users.
- 2022: Poe — early creativity eval with Scale AI.
- 2025: Revisiting my best projects with AI
- Psychodeli closed source reimagining of a 90s screensaver with a "platinum plated" AI backend, see Inside the Math
- Scrutinizer 2025 open source reimaging of a 2007 project with modern web tech
- The "Best" Hack?: Wrote a 4-line loop at eBay to visualize cultural history (e.g. Hasbro, Chanel) by year. Most powerful code in 30 years.
- On "Sessions": Defining the "window of maximum likelihood of non-return." It's just a timeout, but the math makes it meaningful.
- Predicting Trends: Separating the heartbeat of humanity (holidays, SuperBowl) from the arrhythmia (disasters, viral flows).
- Bringing Back Topic Pages: Product update post, ex. Umberto Eco topic page.
- Command Line Photoshop: Fought the good fight for CLI in Photoshop. Spoiler: The CLI dream lives in my heart (and on Quora).
