The fine folks at Apture were kind enough to feature this blog on Friday as their Site of the Week. Thanks!

I’ve been using Apture for the past year since I discovered it being tested on parts of the BBC News site.

What is Apture? It’s a powerful tool that lets visitors to your site discover additional information related to what they’re currently reading or viewing in a way that’s unobtrusive, helpful and effective.

Apture says it like this:

Apture provides the first rich communication platform that allows people to intuitively experience the web. […] Apture gives content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages. Readers can then access these items without ever leaving the page, providing them with a deeper and more meaningful web experience.

You see the little icons next to certain hyperlinks on pages throughout this site? Like these examples, for instance, copied from a random selection of recent posts:

• PRs, try something like this in your next press release planning meeting […]
• If you sometimes scratch your head over labels like Gen X, Y or Z, this concise description list on Wikipedia will also help. […]
• Think of bankers’ bonuses, investor fraud on a massive scale, bank bailouts and CEO payoffs […]
• Take a look for yourself – Neil Williams posted his template on the Scribd document-sharing service […]
• The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #470 […]

A good representation there: Wikipedia entries, Twitter ID, a Scribd doc, video, audio. Click on a few and you’ll see for yourself what the free Apture service can do for you (and here’s a recent addition – a LinkedIn profile as a popup). It’s especially easy if you have  a WordPress, Movable Type or Drupal blog: there are plugins.

Check the full details on the Apture website.

Related posts:

• Enriching content with Apture
• [Twitpic] I just love the elegance of how Apture works on a blog: discreet popups
• Add value to your blog with Apture