Two Degrees Blog

I just installed Apture on my blog, a plug-in which lets bloggers and publishers enhance blog posts and articles with interactive pop-up videos, images, Wikipedia, maps and more from 50+ sources without making readers leave the page.

The San Mateo-based startup launched last year and recently closed a $4.1 million Series A round from Clearstone Venture Partners and a number of angel investors.

Mouseover the film icon in this Apture Video link, as well as the book icon in the link for CVP above, to check it out.  (Hopefully, you didn’t need that explanation how to use it!)

Related Articles

• Apture Raises $4.1 Million Round For Contextual Rich Media Overlays (techcrunch.com)
• Reuters using Apture for multimedia linking (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• Apture Packs a Lot of Media Into a Little Pop-up (readwriteweb.com)
• Robert Scoble: Apture: demo of cool service to build “super links” (via Scobleizer: Technology, innovation, and geek enthusiasm) (scobleizer.com)

As lines begin to form for the release of the Apple iPhone 3G S tomorrow, it’s a good time to reflect on the dos and don’ts of successful branding and product marketing.  I know this video has been around a while, but it’s one of my favorites. 

Enjoy!

This fascinating video, “Did You Know?,” created by educators Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, illustrates the dramatic progression of information technology in our global society.

According to their Shift Happens wiki page, the video originally started out as a PowerPoint presentation for a faculty meeting in August 2006 at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, United States. The presentation “went viral” on the Web in February 2007 and, as of June 2007, had been seen by at least 5 million online viewers.

Today the old and new versions of the online presentation have been seen by at least 20 million people, not including the countless others who have seen it at conferences, workshops, training institutes, and other venues.

In April 1995, President Clinton signed an executive order mandating that all secret government documents 25 years old or older, and deemed to be of “historical value,” be released to the public unless federal agencies sought exemptions for specific files that remained sensitive. The order called for the creation of a “government wide database of information that has been declassified” and stated that its contents “shall be available to the public.”

Included in that database are a treasure trove of declassified documents from the CIA.

Now that that database is easily accessible to the public via the Agency’s FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) Electronic Reading Room, we can search a vast archive of historically signficant documents that would have made a cold-war era KGB agent drool.

And what is the number one search term? …

Is it “Bay of Pigs.” Nope.

What about “Kennedy” or “assassination?” Not even close.

How about “nuclear weapons.” Getting even colder.

The top search term in five of the last six months, by a significant margin, is …

… UFO.

I found this shirt on Zazzle.  Click on image to order.