The GetScientific Blog
The story where Josh actually pitches GetScientific for the first time
Wednesday night was a big night for me and a big night for GetScientific. I went in front of an audience of 130 entrepreneurs and 4 big Seattle venture capitalists and gave our 15 minute pitch. It was the first time I've pitched any idea and the first time GetScientific saw the light of day to a captive, influential audience.
The 15 second pitch:
"I'm Josh from GetScientific.com and we make studying science suck less. We're a link and learning guide rating and submission site for physical science students and professors. Upload your class notes and submit your great science resources at GetScientific.com."
The event information is here so you can see the format:
- 30 people pitch for 15 seconds
- 10 semi-finalists pitch for 60 seconds
- 3 finalists pitch for 2 minutes
He's the friend I came with giving his all to give you an idea of the venue (it's literally the basement of a tech incubator, which adds, like, 100 cool points):
Like a good little entrepreneur, I made sure I had all three but practiced the first the most. The 15 second is above, here's the 60 (and the slides they said we should have but no one else had them):
Once upon a time I was a chemist and when I was becoming a chemist, I noticed one frustrating thing and one interesting thing:
Frustrating is trying to augment your textbook with Google; valuable resources are rarely SEO optimized.
Interesting is that science students amass notes, learning guides, and links throughout their education that never seem to make it to the next class.
We built GetScientific to help students pass the hardest classes universities have to offer - Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Mathematics, and Computer Science - by giving them a place to easily find the best information on their specific topic.
• Crowdsourcing by rating the notes and links
• Content generation making it easy for people to pass on their notes and resources
• Social interaction through connections and comments
Almost 200,000 students enroll in college physical science programs every year so that's a huge base of new users added annually. In addition, we've been working with professors and people in the industry to make sure the same things that appeal to students will make it easy for everyone to contribute.
GetScientific.com: We help make studying science suck less.
The 60 second pitch is supposed to be a story, state the need, and meet the need. Not too bad. I had it memorized, definitely, but I also had notes; you can never be too careful.
I figured making it to the third round was unlikely but, in the spirit of thinking positively, I made sure I was ready. Here's the 2 minute (and, yes, the slides):
Two critical pieces of the GetScientific business model:
1) Very targeted audience
2) Doing something good
The targeted audience appeals to advertisers and sponsors while giving back to the scientific community appeals to universities who contribute a large part of our content. We think finding a balance between profitability and philanthropy will be easy.
The way to economic success is through:
1) Job listings - targeted by overall category or specific tags, paid for by the lister
2) Sponsored content - schools and companies can pay for a sponsor account and submit helpful content tagged with their logo, colors, or advertisement
3) Section take-overs or complete sponsorships - chemistry section taken over by UCSD? Computer science section taken over by UW?
4) Publishing company competition/collaboration - textbook publishers are going crazy figuring out how to take a big step into the present; we can act as a bridge.
Giving back would be through:
1) College scholarships
2) Promoting active student profiles
3) Helping students find jobs after school
Our team
Me, Josh Cunningham, I have an ACS Bachelor's of Science degree from San Diego State University but switched my career to web design and development soon after graduating. I run a small SEO and development business called joshcanhelp.com.
Christoff van Niekerk also has his ACS Bachelors of Science in Chemistry from San Diego State University and is currently attending Loma Linda medical school in San Diego. Christoff is that guy you study with and try to hate because he's so damn good at the material but he's so damn nice that you can't.
We have an advisory board forming now with professors and folks in the industry but no names at the moment.
Traffic on the site increased recently with the start of the recent school session.
It wasn't completely formed but better than nothing!
Well, I went up, gave the 15 second, got a laugh out of the crowd, and felt like I did well but I was not selected to move on. Out on the first cut… ouch! Still, I got a great response from a few folks in the audience and was very happy to find a reason to build a pitch for this site we've poured ourselves into. It was a great experience and now I know that, as it stands, we're not quite VC material yet!
GetScientific is Live!
It's been a long road but Christoff and I finally committed to getting this thing live by the end of April and we hit our goal with a day to spare. The final pieces of the puzzle were:
- Getting our pre-submit process working
- Making sure the submission forms included the right info and excluded the wrong stuff
- Improving the look and utility of the individual submission pages
- Adding categories and sub-categories for all the major subject sections
- Arranging, re-arranging, and re-re-arranging the header to fit everything in there
… and a million other little things! That doesn't meant we're done, in fact far from it. A few things coming up to look out for:
- Improved user profile including the links you've submitted and the comments you've left. we also want to include an ability to save links on the site.
- Refined categories based on feedback from users and subject matter experts.
- Much, much more content!
If you're not sure where to start, the best place is our "Getting Started" page which will walk you through a few of the first steps you should take on the site. Next, check out our About Page and FAQ to get a little better acquainted with what we're trying to do. Next, browse one of the subject area dashboards (biology and chemistry are the most populated at this point) to see what's going on.
If you're a hard sciences student, professor, or hobbyist, please sign up for an account and help us by submitting any notes you might have in digital form or any of your bookmarks that might help other people. Give us a day or so to check them out and get them live on the site. If you find a link you like, go ahead and leave a comment or share it with your social network. To receive updates from the site you can follow us on Twitter, subscribe via RSS, get a daily email with new content, or join us on Facebook.
Finally, if you're a college science professor or graduate student and have any inclination to help us with our category structure, please contact us using the Feedback link above and let us know how you'd like to help. We're happy to help you in any way we can in return.
Thanks to everyone who has helped us along the way and look forward to great things in the future!
Moving from Pligg to Drigg: If Wishes Were Nickels
One very human trait I wish I could eliminate from my repertoire of many is the regret caused by choices made in the past. It’s so easy to look back and think “…if only…” but the time and energy wasted on such frivolity makes it harder to just correct the problems that exist based on your choice.
With that in mind, this post marks the end of my regret for choosing the terrible open-source software package called Pligg for the first iteration of GetScientific.
What Pligg is
If you’re not aware, Pligg is an open-source (meaning free to download and develop on) project that is used to create sites similar to Digg. It’s basically an over-complicated, buggy pile of code that was created for people who have a Digg-like idea and want to get it up and running without a lot of effort.
For this purpose, Pligg is… OK. The stock theme is clean enough, the installation is not too difficult, and it provides a massive amount of customization options. For the non-dev looking to play with an idea, it’s an easy way to get a prototype running and test the waters for your site.
Beyond that, there’s nothing else I can recommend it for.
What Pligg is not.
Pligg is not a good development platform. If your idea requires extending, customizing, or hard-coding features into Pligg, look elsewhere. You’ll spend a third of your time just unraveling the spaghetti of included files, another third correcting issues and improving code that’s already there, and most of the rest just getting the Smarty template to display what you strained to implement in the first place. That leaves a trace amount of time remaining for actually writing code for new features.
Pligg is not a project where you should expect to get support from the people who maintain it. Yes, there is a forum and yes, there are some very nice, smart people inhabiting that forum. The problem comes when no one can figure out the problem and it has to come back to the developers. Expect little to no help. Here are just a few forum replies from the developers that I found in a couple of minutes:
“Here is a simple tip for you, most would find this to be common sense.
When you are responding to a forum post that is over 2 years old, and no one else has replied to it?.
Chances are you are already running a version that includes this sort of thing, or it doesn’t work.”
“First of all you are completely incorrect..
Those are both 100% an iframe AS YOU ASKED FOR…See where I’m going with this wasting time thing? Cause now you forced me to come back here just to explain things you could have found out on your own but thought it was a better idea to chastise the people that were trying to help you. Also it doesn’t matter if you’ve been a member for 2 years or 2 days. you are still wrong.”
“No one charged you any money for Pligg.
No one can understand your issue because your posts consist of only a few words or fragmented sentences that make absolutely no sense. Your English is terrible and comes across as just gibberish. I’ve personally told you several times to write out your problem in your own language and let us attempt to translate it, yet you ignore those requests and continue to post these cryptic messages.”
To be fair, these are all from one person. To continue to be fair, I’m sure it’s frustrating to answer the same questions from people who want a lot of help and support for free. Still, why would anyone want to berate and belittle people day after day for free? The only way this project makes money is if
- they get custom coding gigs out of it (just guessing, not sure if they do that) or
- people buy their terribly over-priced and under-performing modules.
How does this approach help either one of those?
Finally, Pligg is not valid, does not perform well, and is not a good use of your time and energy. If you’re the type of person who can’t learn from other people mistakes, I whole-heartedly invite you to install it and start using it. You’ll see very soon why this project is an awful starting point and needs a complete overhaul if not total abandonment.
So what now?
So, what does this have to do with regret? Well, after many, many hours of trying to hammer Pligg into submission (and doing a fairly good job of it, if I say so myself), I found what we should have been using all along: Drigg.
Drigg is a set of modules that plug into the open-source Drupal framework to create Digg-type site where people can submit content to be rated. The module itself needs a bit of work but the main benefit is the underlying structure: Drupal. Drupal is a mature, secure, and performance-minded framework with a huge development community and many, many, many (many, many) additional plugins and modules, most of which are free.
To be clear, my endorsement is with Drupal right now, now the module itself. I still need to start changing a few things and I’ll give a full review later. Right now, however, I already the enormous benefits:
- The Drupal site is running much, much faster than the Pligg site and I haven’t done any additional permance enhancements.
- The themes in Drupal are very clean and quite easy to work with.
- The code base is smaller, commented, and far easier to understand.
- The documentation is disturbingly complete for an open-source project.
I could go on and on; there really is no comparison.
The future of GetScientific on Drigg
Because Drupal and the Drigg module are so bare-bones (it takes submitted content, stores it, and people can rate and comment on it), there will be a fair amount of additional features that need to be added. Though I see a lot of work ahead, the starting point is so much better and will require much less fixing and rigging down the line.
For now, we’re looking to get the site working how it was in Pligg: both links and content can be submitted, this content goes to a moderation queue for approval, the subcategories are listed in the sidebar, the links are sorted by rating rather than when they were submitted, and there are category and home landing pages where the link lists are a feature of the page rather than the purpose.
So, with that, I absolve myself of regret on this matter. Sure, this system was around last year when we started but we didn’t find it and that’s OK. I learned a lot about PHP and MySQL, I learned a lot about how to choose a framework, and I learned, once and for all, that Pligg should be used for nothing.
A Coherent Rating System for Scientific Learning Resources
The time has come: we need to figure out a great rating scheme. This post isn’t so much a call for help as it is a way for me to organize my thoughts before I seek assistance. I’m guessing you’ll find the Cliff Notes of this post on StackOverflow or Reddit in the very near future.
It’s likely, very likely, that this particular situation has a pre-existing solution that I am not familiar with so I’m going to assume that we’re not reinventing the wheel here. However, it’s important to get this right from the start as there’s no easy way to go back and fix it.
The Mission
Our site relies on registered and logged in users to vote on each item within our system. Some of these items are content pages on our site and some of them are links to other resources. The rating system should work the same for both types.
Content items under each individual subcategory (only two levels of categories: parent and child) need to be sorted and displayed in ascending or descending order based on their rating.
This rating, as I see it, needs to be an average rating based on all votes over time. The votes are whole numbers from 1 to 5, inclusive while the rating displays one decimal place. There can be, in theory, an unlimited number of votes on each item.
New Items
Items submitted to the site will collect in a moderation queue before being made public. We want to be as aggressive as possible when it comes to spam, particularly in our content, and the only way to ensure this is to manually review each item. An item becomes “published” when a moderator votes on the particular item (one vote causes the system to change the content item’s status). Here’s the first problem.
To publish a content item, a vote must be placed for it (no problem). But what should that vote be? Here are my two thoughts:
- Publishing could just set the rating to “not rated.” The first person to rate that content would start the ball rolling.
- Publishing an item could set the rating right in the middle, 3 out of 5. This sets a middle standard and allows content to float or sink from that middle.
After writing this out, I believe I’m partial to the second option. This would give new content a better chance and avoid gaming of the system (voting your own content as a 5 right when it’s published).
Rating on Existing Items
The voting system that is in place records each vote placed by each user. When the list of content links is displayed, each story calls forth all of its votes, calculates an average of some sort, then displays this number. I’m guessing that this system is what prevents duplicate votes.
Here’s the rub: we need to display content based on its overall rating and, right now, this rating is not being stored. I need to figure out the best way to store this rating and I’m tempted to just go with the most simple thing I can think of: create a new average based on the new vote. An example;
If a content link has been voted on 20 times (the system records the number of votes) then the rating is the average score of those 20 votes. If another vote happens, we calculate the rating as such:
(current rating * total number of votes + new rating) / new total number of votes
Each new vote should calculate and then store a new average in the system for that particular link. It seems simple but I wonder if I’m missing something…
Inherent in this line of thinking is the question: is a completely democratic method of voting the right way to sort content? The system has a way to rate members; is it a good idea to incorporate this user rating into the voting? At present, I’m not too familiar with the user rating system and it’s inherent flaws so I’m a bit wary about plugging this mystery system into something that already works.
Edit: I think I like the idea of a Bayesian approach. Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1411199/what-is-a-better-way-to-sort-by-a-5-star-rating
weighted rating (WR) = (v ÷ (v+m)) × R + (m ÷ (v+m)) × C
where:
- R = average rating for the content item
- v = number of votes for the content item
- m = minimum votes required to be published (1)
- C = the mean vote across the whole report (will likely just go with the middle, 3)
Displaying Items
The biggest issue here is how the items should be displayed. A common problem among rating sites is poor sorting of the rated content links. Something with 1 vote of 5 should not be higher than one of 500 votes with an average of 4.5. I think some of this will be handled by the published vote of three (see above) but possibly not.
By using the Bayesian equation above, I think some of this is taken care of, especially if we give it a few extra significant figures. The first term approaches one from zero, causing WR to grow as the total number of votes, v, grows. The second term does not affect the final WR as much as the first.
Still, this article talks about sorting based on rating and points out a few sites that do it wrong.
http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html
GetScientific: What it is and what it will be
You’ve got to love the first blog post, right? Untamed optimism, wild predictions, unbelievable potential… it’s fantastic. The first blog post sums up all the good feelings that surround a new project which, if you’re doing it right, should be myriad. At the risk of falling head-long into this cliche, I’d like to tell you a bit about what we’re doing and how we’re going about it.
What we’re doing
The whole GetScientific idea (GetSci for short) came about late one night in 2008 on the 3rd floor of the San Diego State University library. I was studying physical chemistry with Christoff and mentioned to him a crazy idea that came to me a couple days earlier: a social site surrounding life science learning resources. He was immediately intrigued but I have to attribute part of that to acute Distraction Syndrome (this is a common state of being while studying chemistry that allows you to get distracted by almost anything non-chemical that crosses your path). Regardless, the conversation lead to a manic planning meeting at a Mission Valley coffee shop and the rest is history (after a multiple month hiatus spent actually achieving our degrees).
Our goal is to create a place where life science students can find the learning resources they need to really understand the material being thrown at them. You would think that being a life sciences student in the Age of Google would be easier but, in fact, it’s not. There are too many resources, too much conflicting information, and a plethora of commercial sites that make finding the answer you need harder than actually going to class. The gems out there, the university pages and learning guides buried under millions of pages of useless information, are tough to find and only last as long as a particular graduating class. What happens to these great sites once that group is out of school? They move towards almost complete anonymity until they are found once again by another group of soon-to-be alums. This system sucks.
The other part of our idea is to make a place where students can submit their own notes. Personally, I have pages and pages of notes and study guides that are just sitting on my hard drive. I sent them out to me study group and I hope that others are finding use out of them but who knows? I know several other students in the same position who would be happy just knowing that someone else out there might, just might, get some kind of usage out of their very hard work.
Combine these two main functions with the ability to comment on and rate the information and you have the basic idea of GetSci. This is a site made by life science students for life science students and professors as a way of giving back to a large, mostly disconnected community of people who had a hand in getting us through those exams, labs, and papers.
Where we are now
We started out our idea thinking we would either need to learn programming (which I have) or find an investor and pay to have it built. In the meantime, we found an open-source platform that seems to fit our needs and purposes almost perfectly. This platform, however, needs a lot of work form a bugs and performance standpoint as well as a “let’s make it do what we want it to” one. It’s been tough but, I have to say, nothing seems to have helped my knowledge and ability of PHP more than reading code I didn’t write and trying to make it do my bidding. I highly suggest it.
So far, we’ve fixed some major issues, come up with the first iteration of how it should look, and implemented a few tricks to make the system conform to our needs. There’s a fairly long list of vital to-dos but, all-in-all, we’re making great progress despite having very busy lives outside of this project. I’m proud to say, we’re getting ready to (very) soft launch our little project in February to a select group of testers and advisors. We’re looking to make the site easy to use, find all the bugs, and get it ready for a second stage launch in the summer.
We’re also getting ready to approach a few partners and sponsors to see what kind of support we can get out there. I think we have a pretty solid business model and I can’t seem to stop thinking of ways to make this a successful endeavor. That’s a good sign right?
Watch this space
If you’re reading this and you like what we’ve got going on, contact me and let me know if you’d be interested in helping out with either testing, building, or otherwise. Our structure is loose right now and, really, we’re just looking to learn and have fun at this point.
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