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:
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
