E-Media Tidbits

Here's an interesting website technology I hadn't run across before. An Ottawa-based company called LookWAYup has a new product that can turn a news website (well, any site) into a full-time dictionary. Read any article in a LookWAYup-enabled website and double-click on any word. A left-column window will open on your web browser and give you a definition of the word. The definition also will have search features alongside it, so you can click on a word and have a quick way to search using a major search engine or the website's internal search (say, a newspaper's web article archive). That's an interesting literacy angle for a news site. The system also has a translation component for five languages, but that costs more. (Websites pay a monthly licensing fee of $70 per 100,000 unique visitors. Publishers support the feature by selling advertising specific to it.)

The technology has been deployed at abqjournal.com, website of the Albuquerque Journal in New Mexico. (Unfortunately, that's a pay site so you probably can't get to article pages. See LookWAYup's site for a demo.) A problem I spot on abqjournal.com is that there's no clue on a typical article page about the double-clicking definition feature. What the site has done is notify subscribers about the feature and run notices announcing the capability.