Ask Dr. Weil
As the web was proving itself to be good at delivering daily content, offering database-information, and serving dispersed, idiosyncratic, and passionate communities of individuals, Dr. Weil’s message of health and alternative medicine had the potential of a perfect fit with the profile of his audience on the Web. The producer, the production specialists, the engineers and I, tailored a seamless fit between the information the doctor offered and the target audience via state of the art HTML. The design offered easy access to medical databases, 8 week tutorials, daily Q+A’s, threaded discussions, a searchable archive and most important, the opportunity to interact with your own health responsibly – the objective of everyone seeking medical self-empowerment.

HotBot
The design of HotBot, by its nature, was much more right-brain. There had been indexes of the web that taxonomically classified the web, and there were indexes that were accessed by a rudimentary computer language. The web was quickly becoming populated by mainstream folk who didn’t have points on their heads — while webpages were being built faster than a single megacomputer could grow. HotBot solved the former by providing an interface that used the intelligence inherent in basic English syntax rather than Boolean logic. This was part of the premise that smart computers adjust to humans, not humans to computers. This premise helped us market this new search engine as one attempting to be less of a rote machine, and more humanlike in its capabilities-- a “Bot”. A complex search was no longer a huge mathematical equation but a human language. The design interface has been carefully wrought to configure searches based on that principle. And to address the latter concern of employing human language, HotBot offers lots of tools and does not lose people in geekspeek so that they can leverage the first gargantuan parallel processing database that today, continues to grow incrementally with the Web. Designed using a live iterative process, HotBot became ranked the best search engine on the web by PC Computing Magazine, and even our own competitors (C/net) for multiple consecutive years. That's an amazing feat on the fast moving Web.

Talk.com
As the promise of Java technology loomed, HotWired ventured into another venue to serve the web community. A free live chat environment was engineered and housed. Live events were hosted and personalities were interviewed/challenged in a public parlor of the World Wide Web. It also allowed simultaneous separate personal conversation between individual occupants. The interface design required maximizing functionality with visual allusion to the other humans connected to each of the machines. Unfortunately the kind of conversation that took place, on the whole, never lived up to our hopes unless it was either hosted or moderated.

The Netizen
The true power of the Web promised to be in the participation of politically aware Web “net”-izens as they discussed points of view usually ghettoized to op-ed sections of local newspapers. And here too was a place to discuss and feature ideas and opinions outside of the censorship of the two party system and of corporately controlled media who comes encumbered by squeamish advertising and the cost of paper and ink. The design was a juxtaposition of the intentions of Ben Franklin’s Continental Congress revolutionary broadsheets and visual treats of Dadaist political lampoons.

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