We’re really excited about this.

Today Apture is making the American political process more transparent. Together with the Washington Post’s Congressional Votes Database and Metavid’s index of public domain congressional footage we want to make it easier than ever before to learn about what your congressmen are doing with the following two big announcements:

Apture across WashingtonPost.com

First, WashingtonPost.com will now be using Apture across their entire web site whenever the name of a United States Congressman is mentioned. Just click on their name to instantly view voting records, biographies, and financial disclosures — all without leaving the page. Give it a try right now with these links (if you’re reading this in RSS, open this page in a browser to view the links):

• see Barack Obama’s missed votes in Congress,
• Joe Biden’s financial disclosures, or
• see John McCain’s full WashingtonPost.com congress profile.  

The WashingtonPost.com has an incredible database of Congress & Votes data going back to 1991, and we wanted to make it even easier for their readers to access this dormant content. There’s a big difference between the availability of information and the accessibility of information. Just because you build a library doesn’t mean people will want to go and read. Apture is a way of bringing the library to users, so they don’t have to go. Reducing the number of clicks or seconds it takes to get to the center of the information Tootsie Pop matters a lot.

Here are some great examples from WashingtonPost.com:

• http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113001903.html
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/06/AR2008100602681.html

Syndicating WashingtonPost.com Congress Votes Database and MetaVid videos

Second, we’re now syndicating WashingtonPost.com’s Congressional Votes Database so every Apture user can search, link and embed any vote, bill, congress member photo, biography, or financial disclosure into their page with one click. Take whatever part you want, and mash it up or link it against a YouTube video, a Wikipedia article, or that PDF you scanned last Saturday. The possibilities here are enormous.

And we took it a step further and integrated Metavid’s incredible database of videos from the Senate and House floors since 2006. So now you can not only link to a specific bill in Congress, but link to Nancy Pelosi on the Senate floor discussing the bill (RSS readers, please click through to see these cool links!)

With Apture we want to give any site access to the largest and most diverse network of content possible. The more you help us link together the videos on Metavid and our other video providers with votes from congress, the better we can recommend the right videos, bills and more to editors at the Washington Post and other web sites. So get Apture today and link together different political content to help us make the American political process more transparent.

Check out this video to see it all in action:

Link to the Video

We’ve already received a lot of press about this, including from Larry Lessig, a founding evangelist of the Free Culture and more recently of the Change-Congress movement, check it out: 

http://lessig.org/blog/2008/12/apture.html

Timeline: Catching the Cheaters (washingtonpost.com)

Yesterday, Gilbert M. Gaul of the Washington Post, layed out a timeline that leaves everyone suspicious as to what’s truly going on behind site UltimateBet.com.  That being said, the real news is how the story was enhanced using Apture web clips, documents embeded via scribd.com, and washingtonpost.com videos.

This ushers in a new era of story telling, one that will allow for deeper meaning and factual real time information.

Are you telling stories differently using Apture?

Today we launched several performance enhancements that will make Apture faster than ever before.

With these enhancements, Apture links will show up a little faster, and editors will be able to add new Apture links a lot faster. If you have a slow computer or a slow internet connection, or if you’re using Internet Explorer 6, you’ll probably feel these improvements the most.

For viewers of Apture links, we shrunk the main JavaScript download by more than 30%. (The JavaScript file that browsers need in order to view Apture links is now 33KB compressed, or 105KB uncompressed.) Even though this file is only downloaded once and then cached by your browser, the smaller size means that the browser can show Apture links faster because it doesn’t need to spend as much time reading the JavaScript code.

For editors adding new Apture links, we also made several speed improvements. When you want to link something, we now open the Media Hub without an animation so that it shows up more quickly. And when you choose something to link and click the “Link this Item” button, we now save the link asynchronously, so that you can continue adding more links while Apture saves the link in our database. Finally, we also shrunk the size of the files your browser has to load.

Are you a JavaScript hacker? Do you think that you can make our code even smaller and faster? Well, let us know, because we’re hiring!