RSS Toolbot is the site of the day. Combine several feed links into one page to read. Works like a simplistic aggregator (feed reader) – great if you have just a couple of feed you want to read.

If FeedBurner’s mega-features are a little over your head, you can use the services of 2RSS.com to turn your Atom feed into a version of RSS. Then you can offer both at your site instead of participating in that whole Betamax/VHS type argument that’s going on right now about format.

My name’s Tinu, and I’m a feedaholic.

I love the sophisticated surfers I get to my site via my own feed, I love how much the search engine spiders love my feeds, and I simply adore reading sites via their RSS Feeds. I do the majority of my research for my column that way.

If your site doesn’t have one and you want to be featured in one of my daily columns, you’re out of luck. It isn’t that there aren’t great sites out there with great tools out there that aren’t feed-capable, it’s just that now that I use web feeds as my primary source of news, unless your site was featured in someone else’s feed, it just wouldn’t occur to me.

To folks like me, your site is effectively invisible, unless you happen to come up on the first page of a search, and since I know where to go to find the information I want quickly, I don’t use a search engine on a daily basis.

True story.

But why should you care. I’m just one isolated surfer, a special case, a techie, a feed nut.

Wrong friend.

We feed readers may be in the minority for now, but we’re a powerful, educated, relatively wealthy group of consumers. In my free course about RSS , I’ll tell you the demographics as quoted from a study done by blogads.com – it’s a little skewed because of the pool of consumers they surveyed, but it’s no less telling of the group studied.

Some hints: we’re a middle-aged group with the money to spend on your premium products. The way you might skim past a product priced at $3.99 is the way we might skip over a $25 ebook – particularly if we can hire someone to do the work for us, for the same reason: we’re looking for a balance of quality and price.

I’m not pointing this out to be mean, or insinuate that your site is less than top quality. I’m just telling you what you’re missing by not having a feed on your site.

Mull that over while I post the next tip.

I was too tired to do the extras day yesterday, and I’m still pretty much feeling the effects of adjusting to this new medication for my back. But I promised I would do another day of fun free feed tools so here it is.

To get you started, you can read the article I wrote this morning: Fun Free Feed Tools for Both the Publisher and the Reader They’re more for the Puublisher than for the Reader, but they’re still fun all the same.

The Gossip

I’m sure you read the New York Post story stating that they might be launching their own browser.

And some people scoff – “please. The New York Post? Like they’re a credible paper. I’ll believe that when I see it on Google Tuesdays.”

Well guess what….

The News

A little bird told me that Google has registered the domain name GBrowser.com. It’s a matter of public record. (Be sure to check my trackback links later for where I got this juicy little tidbit.) This was registered back in April.

My Own Wild Theories and Speculations

Honestly, do we really need a Google Browser? What would make it the best thing since Mozilla Firefox?

I’ll tell you what.

#1 Gmail in my browser.

How curse-word-ing sweet would that be? instead of a Gmail tab dedicated to Gmail like the one my work necessitates, they could have a sidebar, or give Thunderbird users special sidebar access that behaves like POP email which we can read offline if we so desire.

#2 A Google version of Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla could use the backing, and Mozilla Firefox is the best damn browser on the planet. It is perfect? Hell no. But they listen to their user base and make appropriate changes quickly.

For example, with version .92, my browser froze when I went to work on the beta version of one of my RSS Sites. Now, with version 1.0, I have absolutely no problems with it.

And it’s open-source – snatch up the code and make your own modifications. Or join the bug team and help them spruce it up.

#2B Easy feeds.

I’m a sucker for a creative man or a really smart one. If Mozilla falls under the wing of Google, that would keep me from the need to have two husbands and a fiancee.

Why am I so excited?

Mozilla Firefox makes feed reading as easy as Bookmarks. Here’s what happens. I have a folder called Feeds in my bookmarks. I browse to a site like Echievements.com. Well looky, looky, in the bottom left hand corner of my browser, an orange button labeled “RSS” appears. I click it and all the available feeds for that site pops up. i subscribe to the one I want (There’s only one right now.)

So far, sounds a lot like subscribing with a reader right?

Watch this.

I go back to the folder where I bookmark the feeds – and Mozilla Firefox has already made me a folder and fetched my feeds for the day AND I can click on open in tabs and read all my news.

In my GD browser. I LOVE this feature.

So what does that have to do with Google and a possible browser?

Are you kidding me? Picture this.

Google.

Plus the power of feeds.

Equals bliss.

What if, in my browser address bar, I could type google investment feeds, and I would automatically be subscribed to the top 30 feeds for investments, all in a nice little folder? If the top 50 sites for investments didn’t have feeds, maybe it could keep searching until it found 30 sites with feeds.

Google my love… I implore you to throw some money at Firefox and make this happen. I’ll be your love slave. I’ll plaster my entire site with AdSense ads. I’ll name our son Google junior. Just do this one thing for me.

Okay…. I’m back from fantasy land… sorry…

#3 The Google technology attached to my browser period.

If a site was down I could click a browser button and fetch the Google cache, if there was one, and browse that instead. If I was at a site before looking for a certain page, maybe Google would already have crawled the site ahead of me and I could Google the pages they found for exacly what I was looking for. I know, I can do all those things from Google itself, but at all times I’m either busy or lazy. Make my life easier.

I’ve got a dozen more ideas, but I have other news to get to – maybe a Google browser wouldn’t be a bad thing, maybe I’m overlooking some way in which it’s inherently evil. Why don’t you tell me what you guys think?

Oh, and don’t forget to check back when the Trackback link below this post starts to show numbers to see any updates and links I have.

I actually thought about not sharing this feed with you, it’s that good a resource. Most of you seasoned marketers will know why instantly. But fair is fair….

So copy and paste —> this feed

One of my favorite sites for information about the Web is WebProNews. I’ve been wishing they’d get a feed together.

And yeah, baby.

They did.