Blogs and articles on the web can be very compelling and engaging pieces of work but sometimes they don’t take advantage of the opportunities the web offers to put ideas and arguments in context.
Depending on the subject matter being discussed you might want to include maps, videos, Wikipedia entries, mp3 files or images; in order to put your thoughts and ideas in context, add value to them and make sure your users truly understand what you are talking about.
This contextual content would traditionally be linked to via hyperlinks that would take you away from what you are already halfway through reading, thus disrupting the flow through the article and making the process of reading a bit awkward. Apture does away with this problem, enabling the publisher to retain users and improve the user experience.
I used a system a while ago called snapshots, it automatically inserted links displaying a preview of the site you were about to click through to. Although it was a novelty to start with it was fairly pointless and didn’t often give users anything they really needed. What did work were the links that automatically popped up content from a Wikipedia entry you were linking to. Apture improves upon and refines that side of the system, and makes it really slick.
Apture is a tool that allows publishers to weave in contextual reference material so users have easy access to information that can enrich their experience of the article being read.
This system allows you to be a lot more flexible in the way you publish and really adds value to your content without overwhelming users when they first come to view your page or sending them off to a completely different website to find something out thus loosing the thread of what you are talking about.
I love the opportunity this system offers both users and publishers to engage with content in a very tactile and user-friendly way that helps aid the reading and publishing process by utilizing external resources with the aim of enriching the impact and value that the content carries.
It’s an evolved contextual hypertext tool that reinvents the rules of web publishing and is really easy to implement and use. It’s what hypertext must always have wanted to be. Brilliant!
This isn’t an advert for Apture. I just feel innovations that benefit both the publisher and user in such a dramatic and unexpected way should be noticed. It doesn’t seem that enough blogs are taking advantage of this sort of system, which is a missed opportunity.
By giving publishers the opportunity to engage users in other content from around the web, perhaps even from competitors, improves the user experience and the value users get from the content.
The more value users get from a piece of content, the more likely they are to revisit that content-provider again. By creating the possiblity of weaving a dynamic multimedia hypertext Apture helps publishers add that value. It will be interesting to see the sort of sites that start to use this system over the coming year as its potential, particularly for blogging, is massive.
