I am trying out a new plugin for The Foo Logs. It’s called Apture.

Apture adds multimedia to my blog with just one click, keeps readers on the site, and creates multimedia content/ links with less time.

You’ll notice a small icon on the left side of each link on this blog (like this). When you hover over it, an interactive link shows up with facts and information. You can shut down the pop up link by clicking on the “x” button on the right hand side of the window or click anywhere outside the pop up window. Pretty simple, intuitive and it doesn’t get in your way.

This app gets really useful as I can start cross referencing words with wikipedia and other reference sites without anyone leaving my site.

For example, I can also directly link to IMDB about a person e.g. Jennifer Garner. Or reference a definition to what blogging is,  show a photo, link to a news video on Haiti or a Twitter profile . (hover over the icon next to the links to see what I am talking about)

The great thing about this app is that from my point of view (the author) … I can add Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps, pictures, music and more from 50+ sources of multimedia content/ references with a click of the button.

All I have to do while writing my blog article is to highlight a word, click on the installed Apture button, automatically search (with the Apture internal search engine) for the word based on whether I want a video, reference or other sources and then create the link based on what I choose.

It took me 2 seconds to search for the “pants on the ground american idol video” below and quickly embed it without leaving my site. I had the choice to put the same video as a link like this too.

I am also not forced to use Apture on all links, i.e. I can link it the normal way with Wordpress — giving me flexibility to pick and choose which links to use Apture on. As of writing this, I believe it is supported on all major blogging platforms.

Other features Apture allows me to do is upload files types like audio, images, PowerPoint presentations, PDF or Word documents, or Excel Spreadsheets.

Installation of the plugin is pretty easy… using Wordpress (I currently have version 2.9.1), I searched for the plugin, installed it automatically and was ready to use it immediately.

One of the negatives with Apture is that on certain video icon links, one may be forced to see a 10-20 second advertisement. I guess that is the tradeoff for it being free. I’ll have to monitor how annoying this is and the frequency it occurs. I don’t believe it happens all the time — nothing terribly irritating. I’m interested to see whether the interactive links slows my site down too.

See a demo video how of Apture works here.  Hover on the icon on the side of the link to start the video.

Let me know what you think of the Apture type links on this site.

[Apture website]