Spicing Up Your Blog: Apture vs. Zemanta Balloons

07
Aug

Spicing Up Your Blog: Apture vs. Zemanta Balloons

author: editor category: ReadWriteWeb

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 now 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-of 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.

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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 into this market is Zemanta, a semantic web company that’s also raised millions and is 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 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, with the recent addition of really nice LInkedIn and Twitter profile options for example.
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 – as opposed to Zemanta’s standards-based offering built as part of a consortium of developer-community minded companies.

Sometimes it hangs on the UI. We found one bug that the company has since fixed but load of the pop-ups is sometimes slower than we’d like as well.

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 autodetection 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 is also a noble, well-funded, mess. Thus the pop-ups you get from Zemanta are real hit and miss.

There are Amazon affiliate ads in the Zemanta product; Apture’s business strategy appears to be free and ad-free for bloggers and charging big publishers to white-label the service. Zemanta’s Amazon ads might get on your nerves.