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If you’d like to connect with me at the conference, just twitter me at “tristanharris”

This Tuesday, Tristan will be giving a talk on New Models for Publishing and Browsing on the Web at monthly meeting of the Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI. SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, brings together “people working on the design, evaluation, implementation, and study of interactive computing systems for human use”. Tristan will talk about the current models of browsing and how Apture’s model allows people to discover information in a richer and more efficient fashion.

The meeting also features Aline Baeck, Experience Design Architect at Intuit, who will speak on How Leonardo da Vinci Invented the Design Profession and is open to the general public. There will be dinner and informal socializing before the talks.

For the last decade, two main browsing models have seemingly dominated the web navigation experience: 1) using the forward/back navigation stack to navigate pages synchronously, and 2) opening new browser windows and tabs to navigate pages asynchronously. Both of these models respect the basic idea that the web should be composed fundamentally of pages. But contemporary web “2.0″ applications continue to show us that there is a need for alternative models. Apture is a new company pioneering new ways to both publish and browse information more efficiently and in a richer format for the end user. I will talk about several of these models, and demonstrate how it is being applied to applications such as blogging and large online publishing websites.

When:  Tuesday Nov. 11th, 7:30pm

Where: PARC’s George E Pake Auditorium

3333 Coyote Hill Rd. Palo Alto, CA

For more information, visit BayChi online at  http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20081111/

Or if you’d like to meet us there, send us an email at contact@apture.com or leave us a comment here!

Meet the Author: Wellington de Melo

To create this multilingual Apture experience on your blog, use the media to search the Reference category for Wikipedia results for the language of your choice.

Would you like to see your blog featured here? Send us an email with your URL to contact@apture.com. Want to go the extra mile? Put together a video demonstration of how you use Apture on your blog!

For California voters, today is the deadline to register to vote in the November 4th, 2008 General Election. The moment we’ve all been waiting for is only 15 days away, so don’t miss your chance to make history. Take a look at the California Voter Registration Form, download, print and drop it off at your local post office. Just make sure to have it completed and postmarked by 5pm today.  

And if you’re already registered and still want to read what the blogosphere thinks about Senators Obama and McCain, check out some political bloggers using Apture.

A Political Season: Musings on Politics…

The straight talkers that run this blog hail from Indianapolis, Indiana and have a penchant for spotting issues surrounding race, conservatism, and geopolitics.

ProPublica.org

An innovative and informative investigative journalism site, ProPublica is all about journalism in the public interest. 

Are you using Apture on your political blog?  Send us an email to contact@apture.com, or leave us a comment here!

I don’t pretend to be expert on poverty by any means, so I’m not going to stay close to the topic.  But I think it’s important to discuss how we can use the web in general to draw attention to important issues.

When Apture’s seeds were born in conversations at Stanford, we were largely inspired by the idea of generating empathy for social issues. People rarely seem to care about social issues on their own, and I believe it comes down to having a good storyteller to get you interested.  Think about the teacher you might have had in high school, who took a dull topic like Chemistry and made it fascinating.  It took charisma.  It took richness.  It took whatever that magic is that allows you to infect other people with why the topic you’re talking about is significant to you.  I’d like to outline two reasons/ways I think Apture can improve communication of social issues in this way.  

First, I think social problems often get trapped by redundancy.  Campaigns use the same words and phrases over and over again, reducing the potency of these problems.  Let me illustrate this with an example.  Below are several calls to action for public social issues.  Fill in the blanks with the first imperative verb (command) that comes to mind:

• _________ poverty.  
• _________ Darfur.
• _________ climate change.

(don’t scroll beyond this point until you’ve guessed these words)

If you’re like me (and a few others I tried this on before I wrote this post), you knew immediately which words to use.  Why?  Because the associations in our minds are incredibly strong- a product of repetition in mainstream media, news articles, and clever online marketing campaigns.  In my mind, the phrases are:

(to avoid cheating)

• Fight poverty.  
• Save Darfur.  
• Stop climate change.

In a sense, the fact that these phrases are memorable is good.  These issues have gained recognition in mainstream U.S. culture. But how effective are they, really?  When you hear these phrases, do you actually feel compelled to go do something about it?  

The more a phrase is repeated, the less impact it ultimately seems to have.  Yes, everyone knows that Darfur is a tremendous problem.. but the phrase “Save Darfur” feels more like a platitude now than a real call to action.  I think Apture can be used to help change this. 

Have you ever read about a catastrophic event online, say the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that hit parts of Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia?   Such events are also described using redundant language, e.g. “the devastating impact,” or “the awful wreckage,” which describe but do not evoke.  Good websites include some photos of wreckage, families on the ground, and maybe quoted interviews describing what the wave looked like, how the ground rumbled, and what was lost.  If done well, the text can create an interesting story.  But imagine if that same story allowed you to see and hear the wave riding in towards the coastline, feel the ground rumbling on the street in Indonesia, read a Wikipedia article about how Tsunamis are formed or what subduction plates were, and understand using interactive guides from the BBC. (read this article on blog.apture.com to see the extended links)

In a far more creative, out-there sense, I like to compare it to triggering mirror neurons in the field of neuroscience.  To understand someone’s position and sympathize with them, you need to be able to mirror the feeling that someone else feels.  Face to face contact makes this easy, but the distance and flatness of the web make it hard to produce online.  Apture, used wisely, can help trigger those feelings.

With the rich links above, some might say you cross the line into sensationalism, which may be right at times.  But why does storytelling have to end at the use of powerful words?  I believe Apture can be used to create more sensory and contextual experiences around why these issues matter.  And it’s just the beginning. 

Now to the second thing I think Apture can do.  I believe Apture can change the disconnected experience between reading an article on the web, and your ability to take action and do something about it.

Have you ever watched a compelling movie and felt speechless afterwards?   The film Blood Diamond, about the diamond trading business and awful civil war in Sierra Leone, is a great example.  The movie has an effect on you: the acting, the soundtrack, the story…  At the very end as the credits roll, you’re left near speechless and more importantly: you want to do something about it, or learn more.  But after an hour or so, we all know what happens: we go back to our lives.  We’re back to thinking about our groceries, smog checks for our cars, or what we’re going to cook for dinner.  

But what if there was an opportunity immediately after the movie to do something about it?  What if there was a big button on the television screen to Donate to organizations helping recovering child soldiers, or to Learn More about the country’s history?  Apture offers those possibilities, empowering people to present background topics, widgets, and media they care about to tell a more thought-provoking story.  But most importantly, Apture offers those opportunities to learn or take action at exactly the right place & time, when people are most likely to want to do something about it. 

The web is pretty flat overall.. but I believe all of us in the web community should be thinking about how we push the boundaries of communicating not only information and knowledge, but emotion and action.  These thoughts are just the tip of the iceberg.

Today I also want to highlight several organizations using Apture to tell more compelling stories for the public good.  The Center for Public Integrity has been using Apture to embed raw PDFs and podcasts for more in-depth investigative reporting, as has the Washington Post and ProPublica with their investigative reporting.  The World Wildlife Fund is using Apture to enhance how they talk about endanged species, and Forest protection projects in Sumatra and around the world.  These are just a few examples.  I would love to see many, many more in the coming years to see how we can persuade and compel individuals with infectious action.  And if you have any, please leave a comment here, or send us an email at contact AT apture DOT com.  I would love to hear from you.

If you’re interested to do make a small difference today, Kiva.org is one of my favorite sites out there connecting the first world community with the needs of third world entrepreneurs.  

There are over 10 million blogs, podcasts, and videocasts worldwide and many of these are created to talk about a person’s ideas. What if bloggers, at least for one day, geared their resources and ideas toward one specific and worthwhile goal? Could they draw attention to one idea that may change the world?

To encourage bloggers to be part of that change, a small group of them have dedicated October 15 of every year to Blog Action Day. This year’s main theme will be on poverty, a perpetual issue that affects more than half the world’s population.

The second annual Blog Action Day takes place today, bringing together 8,000-plus blog, podcast, and videocast sites to post about the same issue on the same day.  The purpose of the effort is, according to organizers, “to create a discussion. We ask bloggers to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue. By doing so on the same day, the blogging community effectively changes the conversation on the web and focuses audiences around the globe on that issue. Out of this discussion naturally flow actions, advice, ideas, plans, and empowerment.”

Across the web, bloggers tackled the issue of poverty from a multitude of perspectives.  Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips discussed why he believes the internet is the key to combatting poverty.  Jaelithe of  the MOMocrats blog firmly believes in the power of education to lift the economic status of those in poverty striken areas.  And if you want to put your money where your mouth is when it comes to Poverty, take a look at the tips given by Moolanomy, a finance and investment, and wealth building resource.  Today’s posts considers ways to volunteer your time and money to end poverty. 

The Apture Team wants to congratulate all the bloggers who participated in the second annual Blog Action Day.  Did you use Apture on your post today?  Send us a link to contact@apture.com or leave us a comment here and let us help spread the word.

Extinguishing Wildland Fires

“Understanding how to put out a wildland fire first requires one to know the various parts of a wildland fire” say Andy Frey and Blake Yerian of Firewiki.net.  This site helps readers learn the ins and outs of wildland fires through creative use of informative diagrams and images linked with Apture. Its a great example of how text can be fine tuned to incorporate more information into the page, but not all at once.  These guys really understand how you can write text with the additional layers/popups in mind.

In a recent interview, Andy says, “The number one guiding principle in design and information for FireWiki is that it must be easy for the average firefighter to browse the site and to find the information that he or she is looking for. The site is built to bring together firefighters from around the country and the world and to get them to share information.”   Way to go for using Apture to make this happen.

For step-by-step instructions on how to create this Apture Experience on your blog, just visit our Help Wiki Article, Apture Link to an Image.

Would you like to see your blog featured here? Send us an email with your URL to contact@apture.com. Want to go the extra mile? Put together a video demonstration of how you use Apture on your blog!

The SF New Tech Meetup is “a networking event in which the next big thing in web development meets the audience looking out for the hot new tip.” –BBC News, Inside the Silicon Valley Tech Bubble

When: Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2008

Where: Mighty 119 Utah St. San Francisco, CA

How: Buy Your Ticket to the meetup here (this link re-directs to eventbrite.com) 

Would you like an Apture demo at your upcoming  technology event or Meetup?  Send us an email to contact@apture.com or leave us a comment here. 

I met the Knight Foundation directors when I was out in Washington D.C. for the Online News Association conference.  They have a fantastic new space in the Newseum, an original museum showcasing the history of journalism and newspapers in the United States, complete with displays of old newspaper front pages from important days in world history.  If you’re ever in DC, you should really take a look.

We have a long friendship and affiliation with the Knights, as they help sponsor the Knight Fellows who come to Stanford University every year.  In 2005 and 2006, we spent many months of the year in fun, engaging conversations with some remarkable people who understood how much the industry was changing at that time.  That’s why I’m so excited to see how Apture is being used on their site.

To learn how to recreate a similar Apture Experience on your blog visit the links below to read more.

How To: Image Slideshow Viewer

How To: Apture Link to a Video

How To: Apture Link to Wikipedia