Manny Ramirez was suspended for 50 games back on May 7, 2009.  Tonight he makes his return in sunny San Diego at Petco Park to take on the San Diego Padres.

What I think is even better about tonight is the fact we get to take a peak inside social media to see what people are saying on Twitter about Manny.  Before Twitter we never really got a sense of what the general public thought about major media news, but now and with Apture this type of data can be brought forth in blogs and websites.

If you aren’t even a Manny Ramirez fan, but have an appreciation for baseball do yourself a favor and watch this video of the Batting Stance Guy immitating Manny Ramirez and many other Dodger players.

As always if you have a blog or website and want to use Apture visit the website and download the plugin.

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We are pleased to announce support for Drupal.  Now all of the sites powered by Drupal can install the Apture plugin and enjoy content on their site from over 50+ different sources.

The Drupal plugin works with a large subset of rich text editors, including (but not limited to) the major editors: TinyMCE, FCKEditor and YUI Editor.  In addition to the supported editors listed above the plugin also supports placing aptureized content in Drupal blocks.

Already a few sites are using the plugin such as Civic Actions and the Personal Democracy Forum.

Below is what the community is saying about the Drupal plugin on Twitter.

The plugin is officially compatible with Drupal 5 and higher.

If you are a Drupal user you can download the plugin here.

Today we are pleased to announce support for Wikinvest.  By supporting Wikinvest, Apture users are now able to insert stock charts within their Apturized embeds and links.  With this addition you are now able to not only able to tell show your readers what people on Twitter are saying about Bing but also how it has affected Microsoft’s stock price.

In addition to being able to embed financial charts you the user can also select how much data to show your viewers from one day to the full financial history.   All charts are updated in real time and display annotations which display key news about the company.

Current Apture users do not need to download a new version of the plugin to get access to Wikinvest.  The charts will begin showing up in your Apture recommended results when you search for a company name or a ticker symbol.

As always, Apture works with WordPress, TypePad, MovableType, Drupal, Ning, Tumblr, Movable Type and Blogger. You can download the plugin here.

When people blog they are constantly including links to additional sites to educate their users.  Embedding YouTube videos, photos as well as links to Wikipedia.  One problem with doing this is as the reader gets more and more into your story they have opened many windows of additional content and may have gotten sidetracked and left your site.

So what do you as the blogger do to tell your story with more than one piece of content without running the risk of losing your reader?

Let’s take an example article on Wimbledon, the biggest tennis event of the year.  Currently Serena and Venus Williams will face off Saturday in the fourth women’s final in Wimbledon history.  See the video below from ESPN discussing the women’s final.

But what if you want to tell your reader more about the topic?  You will notice below the video are links to three additional pieces of content related to Wimbledon.  One is a direct link to what people on Twitter are saying about Wimbledon amongst a link to Wikipedia and a YouTube clip of the 2004 film Wimbeldon.  If a user clicks on any of the additional links they “bloom” open allowing the viewer to consume the content without having to leave your site.

If you like what you see give Apture a try on your site.  It takes a few minutes to install, but could really change the way your viewers consume your blog or website.

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The number of videos on YouTube is increasing at an astounding rate.  Unfortunately a lot of these videos have about 30 seconds of content you want to see and the rest is just filler.  You end up loading the video, grabbing the playhead with your mouse and scrubbing to the point you want to see.  Until now….

With Apture installed on your website you can control the start and stop time for every YouTube video you embed.   Take for example this video of Michael Jackson at the Motown 25 show where he debuted the Moonwalk. Instead of waiting three minutes to see Michael make history it becomes available immediately.

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Our hosting provider Rackspace had a system wide outage today starting at approximately 1:15pm PST with all their sites including their own rackspace.com being affected for some portion of it. Rackspace apparently suffered a power outage in their data center and for reasons yet unknown this took down all their sites even though all of their systems are supposedly redundant. Apture.com was down for slightly less than 20 minutes before we could reach our machines but some of our users might have slightly longer downtime as our servers caught up to the sudden burst of requests coming in.

We are working on a number of things to minimize such failures in the future. All our systems are internally redundant but we are looking into getting a backup data center as well as considering a move to a more reliable primary provider. We take downtime extremely seriously and will continue to do whatever we can to make sure that all our users have the best experience possible.

Shhh. Listen. Can you hear it? Something profound is happening right now. The way people communicate with one another and with government is changing.  Some call it Governement 2.0.  Micah Sifry has used the term “civic software“ to describe the tools powering the movement. And Micah should know - he’s co-host of the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 happening June 29th in New York City.  PDF 2009 will be a gathering of some of the most visionary political activists, technologists, academics, and elected officials in what Tom O’Reilly calls a “two-day tech + politics brainfest.”

So we are off-the-wall excited to have Tristan Harris on a list of speakers for PDF2009 that includes amazing people such as White House CIO Vivek Kundra, Michael Bloomberg, The New York Times’ Frank Rich, and Craig Newmark. We cannot wait to tell the Apture story to this amazing group of people on the main stage at Lincoln Center on Monday. It is going to be amazing!

Profound events are unfolding right now in Iran. When the authority of one of the world’s most powerful modern-day theocracies is eroding, it is worth paying attention. But how can we make sense of what is going on half-way across the globe in a country that has been effectively closed to Western observation and exchange?

Here at Apture we talk every day about how publishers can use Apture to pull content from around the web into their stories. Grabbing rich media and adding it to your site can be an ideal way to help your readers experience what is happening in unfamiliar places and better understand hard to imagine events.

In the past few days we’ve been excited to see The New York Times using Apture in their coverage of the Iranian elections to great effect. Just yesterday, Robert Mackey at The New York Times’ The Lede blog linked to a video showing a seemingly spontaneous protest in Tehran subway station just days after the election. Another example shows Mir Hossein Mousavi addressing his supporters at a rally in Tehran.

Of course, it is not just The New York Times that is using Apture to cover the Iran elections. Other publishers have also found Apture an effective way to tell the full-story. Over the last 10 days our publisher community has found some amazing content and here is a small sample. Hope you find it as interesting as we do!