TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Apture just released Hotspots to connect the web’s information together.

Basically, what it does is make talked about topics clickable on web pages, so you can pull up more information about it without leaving the page. Say, for example, you’re reading about Syria, and the article mentions Hezbollah—but you don’t know much about them. If enough people are highlighting it, or if it’s being discussed across the web, “Hezbollah” would automatically be turned into a link. If you click on it, a little window will pop up that aggregates information from across the web, so you can learn about it without leaving the page.

This has been done before, and it’s often annoying, but what’s really unique about their approach is (1) it dynamically links certain words or phrases depending on what’s relevant at the time, and (2) the pop-up window isn’t annoying. Go and play with it on their blog post. It doesn’t get in your way, it provides actually useful information, and it’s easy to dismiss when you’re done.

The big-picture idea here is to connect the web’s information together into a cohesive whole. Where we should be going is a future where data and information are not just available for us to find on the web, but can instantly be pulled from their sources so we can use them. That way, we won’t have to search for the right information—it will just appear when we need it.

While Hotspots is a relatively small step toward doing that, I’m excited there’s people working on doing it.