Somehow I missed this when it launched—or dismissed it because at first glance it looks like an ad popup—but I found Apture on the O’Reilly Radio blog and I’m giving it a try. I’m not sure if I’ll be annoyed by the popups but since they are limited to things you might actually want to read inline while reading a post, I think it will be useful.
The installation, implementation and usage is awesome. I’m extremely impressed with the admin popups, especially the add media part. It also lets you add things dynamically in pages/posts, maps, videos, images, references pages, etc. Very very powerful and you can also invite people to edit your pages, letting them add “multimedia” to your content. You can even make it wide open for all Apture users.
It both adds popups to certain kinds of links you have put in your posts when writing them (for Wikipedia for example) and adds popups that you have positioned from outside your blog platform. That second type is not portable, if I deactivate the plugin all those dynamically added links and popups (added from my site, through the Apture plugin, not from the admin of my blog) will be lost so that sucks but the original ones will just work like “normal” links.
There’s still the risk of it getting tiresome with the popups but other than that I am super impressed and since I’m rarely impressed by new services these days, that’s already quite an accomplishement ;).