Here's a way to maybe keep your audience engaged with your Web site even when they're not on it: Offer them a branded browser toolbar. Conduit's newish Community Toolbar feature makes it easy to build a toolbar (for free) that you can offer to your site visitors (also for free).

When I heard about this I thought, great, just what we need: More toolbar clutter. Also, we have experience at CNET with toolbar downloads. For us, they weren't worth the development time. Conduit is a little different, though. Regarding clutter, you're only supposed to get one Conduit toolbar at a time. If you download the Webware toolbar, for example, and then another Conduit bar from another site, you won't end up with two toolbars (in theory); you'll get instead the option to switch between the two toolbars in your browser.

And as far as development, since it takes very little time and costs nothing to create a toolbar, site owners really have nothing to lose by offering one.

I'm impressed with the options Conduit offers toolbar builders. In addition to the standard Web and site search, it offers links to current stories (via RSS feeds) and static pages, a mini audio player (for podcasts or music), a chat window so your site's fans can talk with each other even when they're not on your site, and other widgets that are not out of place in a persistent toolbar. In the future, Conduit will include widgets that can float over a Web page.

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