Al Gore Is an Online Hit: New Community Trends Index Powered by Conduit Rates Him Most Popular Search among Green Earth Communities

October 29, 2007; 09:15 PM

Redwood Shores, CA -- Conduit, the leading platform for building online communities via community toolbars, today announced the first monthly results of its ground-breaking Community Trends index. Community Trends is available in full on Conduit’s website at www.conduit.com/community/communitytrends/.

Community Trends, like Google’s Hot Trends, identifies what the public is thinking about. The main difference, however, is that Community Trends is based on communities--the largest and most active ones in the Conduit Network, grouped into categories called community verticals exclusively by Conduit. The Conduit Network consists of more than 12 million users who connect real-time with over 140,000 publishers via the Conduit community toolbar solution, which comes equipped with a set of community functionalities (such as chat, RSS, radio and messages) as well as community search and Web search powered by Google.

October Highlights the Green Earth Communities

Each month, Conduit’s Community Trends will highlight one of these energetic community verticals, such as this month’s Green Earth communities. In September/October, news of Al Gore’s 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his crusade to raise awareness about climate change drove Green Earth community searches for “Al Gore” and “climate,” among others. Additional top searches in this community vertical included “nuclear,” “dolphins” and “globalization.”

The chart below, a sampling of the full Community Trends index, shows the top five popular searches in several of the index’s community verticals. Additional community verticals include Sports, Education, Web Games, Online Radio, Jobs and Shopping. If you would like to view the complete Community Trends results, with the top 10 searches in every category, please visit www.conduit.com/community/communitytrends/.

Conduit has the unique ability to identify community trends, regardless of community size. In order to highlight small communities with interests that may be more off the beaten track, Community Trends will include a niche vertical each month. This month features the Club Penguin communities, built around the popular children's game.

“We're proud to have thousands of publishers who chose Conduit to extend their offering beyond their website and are now providing community toolbars to millions of users,” said Ronen Shilo, chief executive officer of Conduit. “This valuable asset of a vast network of communities enabled us to launch the Community Trends index. We hope that people find it to be interesting and enjoyable, and a beneficial addition to the current knowledge base about online communities and their interests.”

Conduit's community toolbars are completely free and easy to build. Any site publisher or community organization can create a customized toolbar that helps increase user numbers, user engagement and revenue potential by fostering community loyalty and interaction. The branded community toolbar can be loaded with many of the most popular tools and gadgets on the Web today including instant news updates, RSS, widgets, games, multimedia, podcasts and more. All of this keeps users engaged with the website and with each other, creating an invaluable nexus of activity in which user numbers, user engagement and community interaction are amplified.

To create a community toolbar for your website, visit: www.conduit.com.

About the Conduit Network

The Conduit Network consists of more than 12 million users who connect real-time with over 140,000 publishers via a community toolbar. Users surfing the Web are alerted of publishers in the Conduit Network, which facilitates brand awareness. Users can subscribe to publisher communities of choice with a single click, with no download and without sacrificing browser real estate. With the Conduit Network, publishers experience free exposure, achieving user acquisition in an unprecedented way.

About Conduit

Conduit is the leading platform for building online communities via community toolbars. Online publishers can use Conduit to quickly and easily create a free community toolbar to persistently connect with and engage their users via the browser. Consumers can use the myConduit toolbar to search and subscribe with one click to the hottest Web communities. Conduit delivers unprecedented community loyalty and site traffic for over 140,000 publishers, including major brands such as Major League Baseball, Fox Carolina TV, Greenpeace, RE/MAX, TechCrunch, Blogdigger and small and medium organizations in 220 countries around the globe. Conduit's innovative search monetization model allows the service to be completely free and without adware, malware and spyware. The company is privately-held with headquarters in Israel and Redwood Shores, CA. For more information about Conduit, visit www.conduit.com or email info@conduit.com.