On the S8080 Blog, weÔÇÖve recently begun using a really cool service called <a href="http://www.apture.com">Apture</a>. Apture allows you to easily incorporate multimedia elements straight into a single web page - or, in this case, a blog post.
Traditionally, a blog entry may contain a link to (for example) a Wikipedia entry, or a YouTube video, or a photo on Flickr - but clicking any of these links would take you away from the original content that you were reading. YouÔÇÖd lose your place, and clicking around to multiple sites while youÔÇÖre trying to read can just be a pain. AptureÔÇÖs aim is to bring all of this disparate content together, and try to make the web less <em>flat</em>.
Apture allows you to create special links in your posts that open up snippets of content <em>within</em> the current page. This allows readers to keep their place, look up a particular piece of information, and get right back to what they were doing in the first place.
The easiest way to demonstrate is with an example, of course. So in a blog entry, we could be telling you about Swansea - Apture allows us to link in <a id="aptureLink_YcbNIB0TpY" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swansea">Wikipedia entries</a>, <a id="aptureLink_hQqmBR10Sq" href="http://maps.google.com/maps?om=0&iwloc=addr&f=q&ll=51.62044…;, <a id="aptureLink_A1LWSdE6lW" href="http://static.flickr.com/3571/3344661359_56785cfa3f.jpg">photos</a>, <a id="aptureLink_jUy51UL45m" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx5ud9UxY4Q">video</a>ÔǪ even Twitter <a id="aptureLink_y1jPPGCvUA" href="http://twitter.com/SwanseaCouncil">tweets</a>! You name it, you can link it in with Apture. It makes web pages much more dynamic, and puts all of this content to really good use. As Apture themselves say:
<blockquote>"By transforming flat web pages into connected multimedia experiences readers can fluidly dive into related information without losing their place on the page so they can see, hear and truly experience the ideas on the page."</blockquote>
Exciting stuff!
![http://static.flickr.com/3571/3344661359_56785cfa3f.jpg">photos</a>](http://static.flickr.com/3571/3344661359_56785cfa3f.jpg">photos</a>){kind=link}