Beeb goes inline

A feature of blogs since the very beginning, and for that matter a feature of pretty much every website since the beginning is inline links.

You know the ones – the bit that turns blue, red, orange or whatever colour suits the fancy of the designer at the time (although when I built my first website it was blue with a line underneath) and when you click on it you’re taken to another site.

Or in some cases instead of going to another site it pops up a layer, a box of information or even a new window full of useful(?) information.

Well now the BBC have gotten in on the act – or at least they’re having a trial to see if it works, after all – everything the BBC does has to be in trial form first.

There seem to be two kinds of inline links on a BBC News page:

THE TRADITIONAL: This is the straight forward body link to another site – it comes out in blue and when you click on it you leave the article you’re on.

THE WIKI: This is a layer based pop-up that you can move around the screen and includes related information from Wikipedia. You can tell a Wiki link by the W next to it on the page.

I’m not normally a fan of big layer based pop-up boxes as they’re often intrusive and well… annoying but thats because the vast majority of sites that use them assign them to an OnMouseOver command – the BBC site has it assigned to an OnClick.

This means that you can easily find out, with the click of a mouse, extra information about an aspect of the story without having to leave the page – you can get the info half way down and just carry on as normal.

And all the links, as with the links on the Right Hand Menu, are chosen by the Journalist that wrote the original story – although having written stories using the News & Sport CPS – sometimes its just whats left over from the last story you cloned.

Anyway according to the help file on the links: “The links are chosen carefully by our journalists and added manually to the page using a new system called Apture. They are not automatically generated.”

The BBC are using Apture, which, according to their website is a “rich Multimedia Experience and Linking Platform for the Web”.



Although the Beeb seem to be using it exclusively for Wikipedia entries (although there may be other link types as its added to more stories), Apture can create links to YouTube videos, photos, news stories and more.

There’s a blog plugin for the service as well – I’ve added it to Up Your Ego and it will be interesting to see how I get on with it over the next few days or so.

Whats interesting about the BBC Trial is that they’ve added an on/off link so if you don’t (and I don’t get why you wouldn’t) want the inline links it can be easy turned off.

The only article I’ve found with the inline links so far is UK aims to fill all seats in 2012 which seems to be the first trial piece but I get the impression it will be used extensively before the trial ends.

It also seems like they’re going to be doing more than just popping up Wikipedia content. According to the help file “we are also displaying content from other sites, including Wikipedia, You Tube and Flickr. “

Apparently it’s been done to “find out what you think about us offering you related material from other sources.”

When I create an article in WordPress I use the Zemanta plugin – it makes it really easy to add tags as it automatically comes up with ideas based on the text and adds related links to the bottom of the story.

What Zemanta does is help me come up with links and tags and images that add to the story, what Apture seems to do (although I haven’t really tried it yet) is let you share links, photos and videos you already know about in a relatively unobtrusive way.

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