Evernote launches a bookmarking tool for sites
The personal archiving service is offering up a new tool for publishers to add Evernote bookmarking to their site without software.
Personal internet archiving service Evernote is taking a new approach to expanding its user base and bookmarking functionality with a tool for publishers and blog owners called Site Memory. In short, it lets users save Web content for reading later, while helping to promote some of the most heavily saved content with Evernote users at large.
Blogs that add the new Site Memory button to their posts (or any page for that matter) let users bookmark and save that content to their Evernote account. Akin to Web bookmarking services like Instapaper and Read it Later, this lets them absorb the content whenever they want; though instead of just linking to the site like a URL, the entirety of that content is stored on Evernote's servers. The Site Memory feature has also been set up to show users all the other pieces of content they've saved from that particular domain.
Publishers that decide to add the new button to their pages can offer up a number of preset options for their Site Memory buttons, including adding suggested titles, tags, and whether the site's CSS should be taken along for the ride. Publishers that are worried about users pulling down entire posts are also able to restrict what the service is able to capture.
So why would any publisher want to add a feature that might take eyeballs away from returning for a page view or two later on down the line? There's money involved, in the form of an affiliate program. This trickles back funds to sites that are using the buttons on their pages once a user has signed up and begun subscribing to Evernote's premium service.
The $10 affiliate fee is only given to sites that are a part of the program, and only if that user both signs up to use Evernote from that site and then goes on to be a paying Evernote customer (a number that was hovering around 80,000 of the company's 4 million users back in July).
On top of the affiliate program, Evernote is promising to bring extra traffic to sites that are using the Site Memory buttons. "Every couple of weeks, Evernote will promote the most popular sites through our various social-media channels," the company explained on its Site Memory feature page. This differs substantially from efforts like Tweetmeme, which surface user activity in near real-time, and without editorial control.
The feature is available on any site without too much fiddling. Users who want to add it to any piece of content without any special integration can use a button builder tool similar to what Digg used to offer for its iconic yellow voting buttons. There's also the aforementioned way of adding it to your site in a way that can determine what content gets slurped up every time a user opts to clip it.
Users looking for a more universal way of bookmarking Web content to Evernote can continue to use the company's Web Clipper browser add-on, or bookmarklet--both of which offer up identical functionality, though with less controls or tracking tools for publishers.
To give it a spin, you can try it out on this post using the button below:
