You've probably heard that "content is king." If that's true, I'd argue that context is queen. The two can be equally powerful and are often more effective when together than apart.

You can publish the most effective text-based story in the world, one that might garner a Pulitzer Prize. But without extras - hyperlinks, photos, etc. - the story may not be as effective or as popular as it would be in print. That's because the nature of the Web and the way we interact with it is different.

One way we currently add context to print stories is via hyperlinks. But the problem with how we currently hyperlink content is that those links are flat. For example, if I offer hyperlinks on my news site, the user will have to leave my site and click from page to page to page to get to that other content. But what if I wanted to offer more related content, all without making the user leave my page?

Some new contextualization tools are coming to market that should change the way we view extra content. Apture is one example. Rather than links opening up on new pages, you can actually open content windows while still on the Web site. You can continue to open and dig deeper to squeeze all of the contextual information out of a story that you'd like. Check out the great demo on Apture’s Web site.

Apture is in very soft launch now - but when it's fully deployed, watch out. It's going to help piece together the Web in an entirely new way. This is Web 3.0, the "semantic" Web, whatever you want to call it.

Journalists ought to take notice asap - we need to think about content in multi-dimensions.