RavensLog

Ok, I’ve checked out Apture and decided to use it because it’s pretty cool. I’d like to see what they have to offer in the months to come. Technologies like Apture have so much potential, lets hope they can improve on what they have.

So after my last post about Apture, I got a mail from another company, Zemanta who have also developed a semantic web enabling technology. I’ve given it a try and it seems ok so far, just a bit limited in the information it provides. It only gives you a limited amount of images, some relevant articles and some wiki definitions. Another difference is that Zemanta is available while you create your posts and Apture is only available after.

Using Zemanta is easy enough, you can download it for the browser you use (Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox) and there are also downloads for your blog or website platform, drupal included. It doesn’t really offer much configuration though. In drupal it only lets you select the content types and lets you specify where you want the Zemanta control panel to appear.

I think they are continually working on improvements and adding features and functionality but it doesn’t quite match up to Apture. I think Zemanta needs a more comprehensive and useful image gallery selection, a better selection of related articles, some video and an additional search feature and some other useful stuff. Also, it would be more user-friendly if you could easily delete something that you added to your content. It would also be more user-friendly for your website users if they could preview a teaser to the links added by Zemanta, perhaps in a pop up block or something.

You should check it out and decide for yourself though.

The way we use the Internet has already changed… Web 2.0 is still talked about as if it’s something new… but it’s been around since just after the Web 1.0 bubble burst… perhaps even before.

Web 3.0 is all about a semantic web and how we use the web to access information. The web and some new web technologies have improved the way we do this.
With Semantic Web enabling technology like Apture, adding information is easier and enhances user experience to turn your website content into a hub of information. It lets content publishers find and incorporate information and multimedia directly into their web content. This is pretty useful and convenient.

But I think that a technology like Apture would be far more useful to users and a lot more effective in delivering information if the backend/admin interface was available to your website users but without the ability to add the content to your site. So if users on your website could use the backend interface for searching and accessing information by merely highlighting the text of interest then the user experience would be more comprehensive, convenient and useful.
Adding Apture to your website is easy enough. If you have a Drupal installation then you need the Apture module installed. If you have a WordPress site then you need the Apture plugin. I’m not gonna go into the specifics of setup and configuration because it’s pretty straight forward.

Once you have that installed/activated you need to register with Apture or login if you already registered to add your website/s where you would like to use the Apture technology. You will then get a bit of script that you need to include in the Drupal Apture settings if you are using Drupal or simply activate the plugin if you are using wordpress. That’s pretty much it to get you started with Apture.

The web is about access to information, whether it’s about something or someone, technologies like this will only make it easier and more convenient to access.

I only read today, after trying to find them online, that they got placed into liquidation earlier this year. Wow, what a shocker! I thought they were doing so well. Actually they were for a few years.

So what happened? Some say it was BEE that lead to their demise but I think that’s just an excuse. It’s an excuse for poor financial management and a bad business model. Correct me if I’m wrong but they sold to registered dealers/resellers as well as direct to businesses and people who weren’t registered without adjusting prices for for unregistered customers. Why was that a problem?

Well, by doing that, they effectively shut out the resellers that were buying in bulk in favour of selling individual items to anyone, including their resellers customers. That was a move that created problems for resellers who lost out because customers went direct to LightEdge. So, resellers then went elsewhere and LightEdge lost out on bulk sales.

It had nothing to do with their BEE compliance or lack there of.

During the dot-com bubble, around 1995 – 2001 (crash started on 10 March 2000), Internet companies saw phenomenal growth with share prices hitting extraordinary highs. But it didn’t last because all bubbles burst as some point. There were just too many IT companies that tried to get big fast with a strategy of carrying sustained net losses with the hope of gaining enough brand recognition to turn that around to a profit later when they are the big players in the industry.

That was the first wave of the Internet, now referred to as Web 1.0 when websites were more about form, how good a website looked and how flashy and impressive it was. No wonder the dot-com bubble burst the way it did. Companies invested too heavily in web technology that gave them nice looking brochures that used the web to present those brochures to users.

That was also a time when bandwidth was a limiting factor. Web 1.0 was a time of dial-up connectivity at 50 – 56k transfer rates. We now have better bandwidth with broadband being between 512Kb/s – 1Mb/s as the average. The better bandwidth opens the door for better functionality.

So Web 2.0 should provide improved website functionality that delivers better service to users, making it easier to turn users into customers. An increased customer base translates to increased turnover that increases net profit. Increased net profit indicates better return on investment.

So businesses should harness the power of web technology as a functional business tool rather than just to display electronic brochures.