I literally stumbled upon this service provided by Answer.com yesterday and I was floored at how easily it could be implemented and used.
AnswerTips from Answer.com is a very simple service that allows your readers to simply double-click on any word on the site to pull up an in-browser modal window to help define or explain the word. Just go ahead and try it here on ChurchCrunch.com!
In less than 3 minutes I had it fully working, installing it on my footer. They even have a WordPress Plugin to do the trick if you want to rock it that way.
I’ve been trying to find a reason why one shouldn’t have this service installed on their blog or website and I can come up with a few but perhaps I just haven’t used it long enough. It is really quite useful.
What would be cool is if one could create their own version of this particular service for their own Blog or Ministry/Church website so that it could pull in data results from a pre-determined data set, or just keep the results limited to the entire domain and/or your church online properties.
What do you think?
Liz says
Awesome tool, awesome post… Going to share it with others 😉
Ron_Tuffin says
Man that is really cool. although as you say a customizable 'dictionary' that is specific to your own site would be even better.
Aaron says
It's definitely neat, but exactly how useful is it?
How are visitors going to know they can double-click on anything in the page and get a window-pop-dictionary. Wouldn't it be easier to hyperlink sections of text that deserved special explanations, etc?