Creating A Conduit Toolbar for Internet Browsers

Conduit.com is a site that allows you to create a “custom” toolbar that works with popular Internet browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari.  The toolbar can be custom created from scratch, then offered as an additional tool allowing users a direct interface or “Conduit” to the most valuable and important segments and links of your Blog or website.

Having a custom toolbar available to readers can add extra value to those who regularly visit your site.  By adding this toolbar to your browser, or creating your own custom toolbar, users can access the important information or areas of your site they want to know more about without having try and find it on your site.  The only question and challenge for you is, what should you add to the toolbar to make it the most useful and powerful tool for your readers?

Creating a custom toolbar at Conduit.com is fast and easy, and the best part is that it’s FREE.  Imagine having your customized toolbar installed on millions of browsers across the web. It would not only provide extra value to your readers, but could increase the traffic and exposure to your site.

Here is a sample of one I created for GeekEstateBlog, you might want one of these for your site or Blog.

Try the toolbar on your browser, then Click Here, to create one of your own.
Select Your Browser Below To Download The Geek Estate Blog Toolbar.

The official Google Blog had a “big” announcement yesterday:

10/21/2009 02:09:00 PM

“At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.

This has been big news across the blogosphere today… unfortunately it provokes a “meh” response from me.

Why?

Because a simple plugin for IE or Firefox called WebMynd (that has been around for quite a while) already did this and much much more.

Webmynd – Search the Real Web

Webmynd rides hidden in your browser and allows you to do a number of super sweet features:

1.  It replaces the paid placement Google ads with results from sources that you choose including Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Scridb.com, and more.

2.  It keeps a record (yes – it’s erasable!) of your browsing history and categorizes it in multiple ways for easy revisiting later on.

3.  Customizable – by adding your own sites to searches you can find things that you never would have found before.  With a simple click you can search all, some or just your favorite sites for information.

4.  Share to multiple social networks from any site you visit – unfortunately at this time there is not a “trackable” link provided (i.e. Hootlet) but their engineers have assured me they’re working on this.

With all of this at your fingertips and an extremely lightweight interface riding over your existing browser, Google’s announcement of incorporating Twitter Tweets seems like a “too little too late” to me.  Download the plugin at www.webmynd.com and prepare to search in an entirely different way.

HTML5 and the upcoming CSS3 standards will allow developers to create extremely powerful web based applications.

Additional changes in 3.5 include
-Support for downloadable fonts
-CSS Media Queries
-HTML5 <canvas>
-ICC Profiles
-Location Aware Browsing
-Available in 70+ Languages and more

If this version proves to be as stable and secure as advertised, it will certainly have Firefox back on track to keep stealing browser market share.