Spicing Up Your Blog: Apture vs. Zemanta Balloons
Pop-up info windows: someone had to do it right, right? After years of pushy, worthless little window overlays that pop up when you hover over a link, there are now a number of companies trying to offer bloggers and their readers a whole lot of value in what could be a handy format.
Below we briefly review two of these services, Apture and Zemanta's Balloons. Is this kind of product really worth using? Once you add a pop-up of someone's LinkedIn profile next to their name as you type it, you may never want to go back to not having a tool like this at your disposal.
The best-known startup in this space right now is Apture, a company that launched last year and lets you fill pop-ups with all kinds of multimedia content. The newest entrant to this market is Zemanta, a semantic web company that's used by bloggers to add related links to their posts all over the web. Last week Zemanta released a product called Balloons; it looks a lot like Apture but it's open source, semantically smart and standards-based. We decided to put both products to the test, and here are the pros and cons we found in each.
Apture
We started by testing out Apture's WordPress plug-in (on my personal blog) and were very happy with the results. It takes just a few minutes to install, and learning to use it is quite intuitive. We wrote an extensive review of Apture in February.
Pros:
- It's beautiful. From the admin section to the pop-up windows, design has been emphasized at Apture.
- Lots of user control. The amount of control users have over what's included in their pop-ups is amazing. You can choose between assets with a few clicks, or you can pick out start and end timestamps in an embedded YouTube video. The list of options is big and keeps getting bigger, as evidenced by the recent addition of really nice LinkedIn and Twitter profile options.
- You can now include multiple tabs in one link, making it easy to pack a lot of information inside.
- The user experience is solid, and the product is pretty well baked.
Cons:
- Apture is proprietary software offered by one company, unlike Zemanta's standards-based offering, which was built as part of a consortium of developer- and community-minded companies.
- Sometimes it hangs on the UI. We found one bug that the company has since fixed, but pop-up loading is sometimes slower than we'd like.
Zemanta
Zemanta is a feature-rich service for bloggers and has a great API that developers can use to automatically discover keywords in bodies of text in lots of different scenarios. You should check it out. It's quite easy to use. Last week the company released a feature that competes with Apture, called Balloons. Balloons is now automatically included in the blogging plug-in from Zemanta, which is very easy to get started with.
To be frank, we would recommend installing the core Zemanta plug-in for the rest of its features but using Apture for info pop-ups instead. The way the two products are administered is very different; Zemanta detects key concepts in the text of your post and suggests Balloon links you can add with a click. You're limited to adding just those handful of Balloons; you can't link up just any text you want.
Pros:
- Zemanta is open source and standards-based. It feels good to use.
- Zemanta works with the rest of the tech community and has some awesome tools for supporting non-profit organizations. Did we mention that it feels good to use Zemanta?
- The auto-detection of key concepts -- just click on the buttons and they're linked to resources -- makes Zemanta a little bit faster to use than Apture. It takes fewer clicks.
Cons:
- This tool isn't nearly as pretty. In fact, the pop-ups are almost the opposite of pretty.
- You have far less control over the sources of information you can include. Zemanta's Balloons is tied to the ambitious CommonTags standards effort and apparently does not include anything outside the world of standards. That's noble but limiting.
- Most of the links Zemanta inserts are to FreeBase, which is like a machine-readable version of Wikipedia but also a noble, well-funded mess. Thus the pop-ups you get from Zemanta are quite hit and miss.
- There are Amazon affiliate ads in the Zemanta product; Apture's business strategy appears to be to serve bloggers for free and ad-free and charge big publishers to white-label the service. Zemanta's Amazon ads might get on your nerves.
- This is a very early product, having just launched last week. We hope it is further developed.
That's our experience so far with these tools. If you've tried either or both, we'd love to know about your experience as well.
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Hi Marshall,
Thank you for the great writeup and glad we resolved your issue yesterday. For the map of Eugene above click on the Street View button and see if Google has mapped your city. I'm sure they have done Portland, but not so sure about Eugene.
Andrew
intext content delivery is definitely an ideas whose time has come. i think "context" was the one thing that is missing between the best of what the web has to offer , and audiences on the internet.
Zemanta's more open approach vs apture's interface, this should definitely bring in more innovation among all the players.
We'll definitely be glued to how both the products scale in terms of barriers to large-scale implementation.
Keep Clicking,
Bhasker V Kode, Co-Founder & CTO
hover.in - the user-engagement platform for brands
I haven't looked at Zemanta yet, but I am really excited about Apture. I know of at least one writer using Apture in a very interesting and exciting way for an interactive, multi-format story called "The Miracle in July". Check it out and be sure to give the author (Michelle Anderson) your feedback and tips. http://themiracleinjuly.com/
I am always looking for tools like this! Thanks a bunch! http://www.darkbluesun.com/WP/
I've been using both Samantra dn Apture on my blog for quite some time now. I find them both invaluable. Have not yet tried BALLOONS -- amost certainly will do as you recommend: Apture for pop-ups and Zamantra for links.
Side comment: I find the Zamantha links personally useful, as well as useful for my readers. I often follow those links myself, once I've uploaded my post.
@marshall
Thank you for this great review! This space definitely needs some attention since we came a long way from initial "make a preview screenshot of the page and put it in a popup" a few years ago.
As you say, Zemanta's solution is an addition to our 'writing assistant' functionality. This is the first version of Balloons and we'll polish them out until they rock for everyone :).
We are listening carefully to the user feedback, so a review like this really comes handy! Stay tuned and keep on the great RWW reporting you are doing!
bye
Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta
I have bee using both for a while now, i find Apture to have better links and great pictures where as Zementa doesn't. Apture does hang a bit on page load but the choice of multi media links is impressive and i am a fan.
Like some others here I've been using both Zemanta and Apture, and they do both have pros and cons (I am partial to Zemanta's open source model, though).
I *really* want to love Apture, but there are still some performance issues. I'm not using Zemanta's Balloons yet, and may just stick with the core. Not only does it generate links, but related content and tags as well.
While I'm personally not a fan of overlays, balloons or whatever you wanna call 'em, a lot of people are. Performance aside, Apture is the best player I've found in the space, (to date), and I'll continue to test both of these as they move forward.
Nice post, and great comparison, Marshall! Articles like this are one of the things I value most on RWW.
I'm glad that Apture and Zemanta are helping restore honor & dignity to the much-maligned in-text links.
Having contextual info at your fingertips instead of requiring a detour through a search engine is a great convenience. We're doing similar things at MashLogic, but on behalf of users.
Thanks for an illuminating post the subject of contextual pop-ups. I think it's a space that will definitely heat up in the months to come.
I think that of special interest are:
1. Widgets that enrich content automatically - because of their low cost to use.
2. Widgets that enrich content in the archive dynamically - because they help keep the topics mentioned in archive articles fresh with new materials.
Currently we're working on a similar project at Semantinet (http://headup.com. Publishers and blogger who want to join the pilot are welcome to check us out at:
http://blog.headup.com/headup-publishers-widget-alpha
Cheers!
Mike
comparative review of Apture vs Zemanta Balloons, two tools to spice up your blog with additional info http://bit.ly/fUL3R [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/3179910835]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 14, 2009 12:30 AM
Didn't know about Apture, but I will probably give it a try soon.
Thanks for the information.
I tried zemanta a year or more ago and wasn't impressed by the suggestions they were able to make based on the content that I was writing, but they may have improved it and it's really dependent on what you're writing about. Apture makes adding things like google maps and youtube video so easy and fast. I teach this to new real estate bloggers every week and they fall instantly in love. I'll probably check out Zemanta if they're ever able to ditch the ads and make the windows better, but one thing you failed to also mention is that Apture can also make you money if you're pitching your amazon affiliate grub.