Quickbrowse!

Sorry — yesterday’s column about Japan will run tomorrow.

Want to get this silly column delivered to you every weekday at 6am?

No? OK, then, want to speed up your web surfing?

Here’s a great new site I recommend not only because I own a little piece of it. And yes, of course, it’s free with no immediate revenue prospects in sight — but surely that alone makes it worth $100 million.

Anyway, it’s www.quickbrowse.com . Basically, you tell it the sites you like to check out every day (or every whenever) … Dilbert and the Miami Herald sports page and maybe the business sections of three papers plus Yahoo.

You can even “bookmark” that collection of pages, so you only have to tell Quickbrowse once.

So now you start your computer, click that bookmark, go off and make the coffee (or call your mother — you know she’d love to hear from you), and when you come back, it’s all there, on one long Masterpage. Just scroll down to see it all. No need to enter separate URLs and wait for each page, sloooooowwwwwly, to load.

And as you do run your eye down the Miami Herald headlines, say, you can click the stories you want to read — bing-bing-bing. By the time you’re done clicking them, at least the first one has been added to Your Masterpage ready to read, with the others following rapidly as you read the first.

Neat, no? This can save you a lot of time.

The other thing you can do is instruct Quickbrowse to e-mail the stuff you like to see on whatever schedule you’d like to see it.

If you use AOL, you may find the formatting doesn’t work very well with this feature — we’re trying to improve it. (And instead of Alt-Tabbing to jump instantly back to your Masterpage each time you click a link, with AOL you Ctrl-F6.) But try it.

For example, say you like to check out the cheap travel deals. Well, here’s a site you should visit: www.webflyer.com/@deal/crdeals.cgi/crdealmain.htm . But you will find that the Domestic Airfare deals are updated at 3pm Mountain Standard Time every Wednesday. Who can remember that? Quickbrowse can! So what you’d do is go to the page that has the deals for your specific city and then cut-and-paste the URL (web address) for that page into Quickbrowse and have it e-mailed to you at 5:01pm Eastern Standard Time (do I have my time zones right?) every Wednesday.

Quickbrowse is young, so you may find it can’t do everything exactly as described. And for sites that require your ID or password, it might take a little jiggering in the URL to get it to work automatically (we help you with that) . . . but check it out.

Amazingly, this new and unpublicized site somehow got discovered half a world away and was “site of the week” in the Bangkok Post a few weeks back, and got a great write-up in the Irish Times last week — we truly are becoming a very small planet. Forget Esperanto. (Kids: that was once proposed as the universal language.) It’s . . . Internet English. And aren’t those of us who happen to have been born in English-speaking countries lucky sons of guns? Why, yes, we truly are.

Anyway, try Quickbrowse. And if you want to buy 1% of it for $1 million — a bargain given its complete lack of revenues, profits or dividends (kids: stocks used to pay dividends, which investors used to use to pay the butler) — just drop me a line.