ReadWriteWeb readers are some of the most educated on the social web, surveys tell us that. Smart people never stop learning, though, do we? Now reading ReadWriteWeb is all the more educational with the addition of a new feature from startup company Apture.
Try it out: Highlight any word, phrase or name on this page. Now click the little “search” button that pops up. This is a good one: Krishna Bharat.
Pretty cool, huh? Apture’s new contextual search feature was incredibly easy to add to our site (one line of javascript) and we think it adds a whole lot to the reading experience here. So find a word or phrase here that you’d like to learn more about – and highlight it. You’ll see a web of multi-media connections swirling around our written content at the snap of your finger.
Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Crunchbase and more sources are intelligently queried to offer up all kinds of information about your search terms in Apture. We try to make our writing here accessible and offer some definition of terms and introductory explanation of companies or technologies familiar to advanced readers, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. Now there’s even more information than we can offer – built right in.
We named Apture one of our Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 and this Summer, government technology site WashingtonTechnology.com offered it as an example of the semantic web, one of what it called the top 5 technologies that will change how government works. I first saw Apture at Foo Camp several years ago, before it launched, and everyone there was wowed.
We haven’t mentioned the addition of Apture to our site yet, but thousands of you have already used it here to search for everything from phrases like “assessing cloud performance” to the name Justin Bieber. (We are proud both that RWW is the leading tech blog that makes the most Justin Bieber jokes per month and that we have readers who don’t know who he is.)
Let us know how you like the feature. We haven’t decided yet how to best let people know that highlighting a phrase here to search for it is an option, but we’re pretty excited that it is.
