@dvocable

Surfing the Internet today involves a lot of visits to Web 2.0 sites. You want to read blogs, submit interesting items to your social bookmarking sites, check out the latest videos, and pictures uploaded by users at photo sharing sites. To remember all these site urls, either we use our browser favorites, a social bookmarking site, or use a feed reader. We also install select individual bookmarklets of social booking sites in our browsers to do the job.

Then we conduct tons of searches on the Internet – not only on Google, but dozens of blog aggregators, and other social bookmarking sites – as we want to search for not only news items or simple Internet searches, but among blog posts, forum comments, uploaded videos, and pictures. To do all these, we go to the individual search sites or use the search box in our browsers, or use a browser toolbar such as the Google toolbar or a Yahoo toolbar.

How about we use a single toolbar to do all these mentioned above? Enter Web 2.0 toolbar – a browser bar that lets you do dozens of things including:

What I liked about the toolbar is that it offers me the option to access all these Web 2.0 daily essential visits at one place in my browser, so that I don’t have to type any individual urls or log on to my feeds reader. The toolbar has versions for Inter Explorer and well as Firefox.

1. Submit interesting items to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Spurl, Blink, Yahoo MyWeb, Reddit, Newsvine, Mag.nolia, and many others.

2. Read feeds of popular blogs such as BoingBoing, Techcrunch, Digg, Netscape, and many more.

3. Search on 32 search sites such Google, Wikipedia, ebay, Youtube, Dictionary, Blogger, etc. and also on the site you are on.

4. View job boards like CrunchBoard, GigaOM Jobs, etc.

5. Links to popular videos pages like Youtube Most Viewed, Google’s Most Viewed videos, etc.

6. Links to popular pictures pages like Flickr Most Interesting, Today’s New Webshots Album, etc.

7. Interesting items on the PRWeb site

8. Gadgets like weather, email notifications, etc. There are more widgets available.

9. It can also place a MS Office shortcut menu on the toolbar itself, so that you can access your favorite Notepad or MS Word from the browser itself.

Just one recommendation I have is that it should allow users to add their own specific feeds, search sites, and links to the list already there on the toolbar by default. This way, users can customise it to suit their taste.

Custom make your own browser toolbar

Now having written this, I did some more searches and realised that this toolbar has been created with a service from Conduit that lets webmasters and bloggers create their own toolbar. You can in fact create your own toolbar for your blog with this free service from Conduit.

The Web 2.0 toolbar is fine as it has got most of the sites covered. But just in case you are one of those who are keen to experiment, head on to Conduit.