Apture recently opened up their rich multimedia linking platform to the public. Apture allows site publishers/bloggers to easily find content related to their articles and link to it. The major appeal of this tool is that the linked pages appear in a HTML overlay window (ie pop-up).
Don’t get lured by generally accepted ideas like the readers of Techcrunch: Apture’s popups open up a world of infinite knowledge that superbly completes any written article. Apture is a convenient compromise for publishers: it provides great links which readers can browse from the original site. While the discussion is leaving the blogosphere, richer content is settling in.
“With our linking platform, websites can now be enriched with background articles, images, maps, videos, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, podcasts, music and even interactive widgets in a way that’s never been possible before. Our solution will shift the way we currently publish and communicate on the web and will generate empathy and knowledge transfer, which will create fresh opportunities for distributed commerce.”
Tristan Harris, Founder/CEO
The public launch of Apture comes with the release of a few cool additional features to the service. In pole position is the first non-pop-up feature of Apture: the easy embed feature. Just select a spot in an article where you would like to place a media, and Apture intuitively creates an area to embed content, by brushing aside the existing content. Once the free space has been created, simply use the Apture tool to easily select what content you want to place in this embed area. This way, Apture makes the embedding process shrink from over ten clicks down to less than 5 (and it finds that content for you, in case you don’t know what to look for).
Apture also offers a new tool to have more control on videos. If there is a specific moment of the video a blogger wants to link to, there is a “start viewing at time” feature that allows to do this. That makes linking to videos much more compelling.
Even in private beta, Apture received a lot of excellent feedbacks. Now that it is public, I recommend any site publisher to give it a twirl. As a media producer, I strongly recommend it to other media producers/bloggers: It is a great way to suggest a lot of your videos to your readership in an unobtrusive manner.