I think it’s great, to be honest: simple to configure. And I’m using a php call directly in the page file

people generally forget that just as the book is waning, the scroll vanished hundreds of years ago, yet we still use them and understand what a scroll means to information transmission, etc etc.

with each metaphor or each transition, you gain something and you lose something. When we transitioned to books it became more feasible to jump around a text, until then you needed to start at the beginning and follow through to the end, it just wasn’t pragmatic otherwise.

the transition from books to web means keeping different information in one’s head and on the page. but soon people won’t even know that.

bkitzur, he’s no Steve Jobs, but he is definitely a brilliant guy for coming up w/ Better Place’s solution.

there is still something a little bit hazy about the math — i’m not sure it adds up the way he says it does.. either he’s making mistakes in the numbers he’s quoting or he’s leaving out other numbers that make the equation make sense. (that’s what i thought when i read about them a year(~) ago in wired, and that’s what i felt when i saw him talk now.)

First off, thanks for the spelling correction.

Regarding the tone of what you wrote, I’m not sure I understand what happened in between this comment that you posted, and your comment above. I don’t think I whistled a significantly different tune in my two mentions of your company.

To cover my bases, I booted into Windows to try out your software. It seems to work alright for software at this stage of development. It adds a quick way to do the obvious searches off of a single node (term or phrase). There’s promise in the way it integrates some of the intelligence from the social networks.

However it doesn’t do, nor claim to do, any sort of reasoning. I would wager that under the hood it doesn’t understand relationships on any more sophisticated level than ‘related’. It casts a wide automatic search net, but at heart isn’t doing anything more than matching text in what it finds. This makes your claim to being a ’semantic web’ tool ring hollow to these ears.

Regarding your other claims of the difficulty of the bottom up approach, etc. I think we’re substantially in agreement. The later posts in this series spell out my position, and I think you even gave me a ‘word up’ in the comment linked above.

I’m interested to see where headup heads to. Opening up the API is intriguing. Of course, whether you provide value to the market will determine your success, not words on my blog.

Eliezer

I counted to ten before writing this response but I’m still hopping mad.

Is it too much to expect you’d have the decency to try something out before passing judgment on it?

It’s the least I’d expect from someone who presents himself as a teacher, “technologist and spritual seeker” (the typo, dear teacher, is in the original BTW).

1.
As a matter of fact Headup’s framework for accepting sources is expandable indefinitely. If it has an API or an RSS we can crunch it and use it as a source.

2.
We’re in the process of simplifying adding sources to a point that users will be able to add sources to Headup by themselves.

3.
According to Tim Berners-Lee the “larger vision of the Semantic Web” is this:

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers”

I don’t claim Headup is there yet but in my humble opinion we’re definitely well on our way, and a damn sight closer than any other player in the field.

The simple truth is that despite having nearly a decade to prove itself the bottom-up approach to Semantic Web has failed dismally. Defined by a bunch of academics it relies on content publishers compliance with cumbersome standards that are costly to adopt and have yet to prove their financial viability.

Headup and other Top down Semantic Web applications are far more likely to succeed exactly because they are pushed by enterprise, require nothing from publishers and present financially sound models (Amazon’s API for example…).

Mike
“I tweet @headup”

For those still struggling or looking for a solution, we just released a plug in a few days ago that makes it really easy to add Google Reader shared items to your blog and customize what it looks like. It even includes widget support.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recommended-reading-google-reader-shared/

Would love your feedback on how to improve!