The brainchild of a freelance journalist looking for a better way to organize his online resources, Quickbrowse offers a graciously simple interface. Enter the URLs of the sites you want to metabrowse into a single web form, hit submit, and voilà! A very long, scrollable page appears containing the content from all the URLs entered. Not only does it make it easier for you to check all your favorite sites on a particular topic quickly, you can also share your Quickbrowse bookmark with friends. Our editor created a gadgets page that makes it easy for all of us to pull up our favorite gadget sites in one click, giving new meaning to being on the same page at work. (The magic, of course, works best on standard HTML pages that aren't loaded with fancy plug-ins like Flash. Just don't load too many URLs on one page or your browser may quit on you.)

Another metabrowsing favorite is a service called Onepage.com that's almost as intuitive as Quickbrowse and includes the ability to pull in pieces of web pages. That's a great feature for customizing long home pages like CNN.com, where I quickly figured out how to load national headlines without any sports.

There are plenty of other metabrowsers, but few of them are as easy to use as Onepage or Quickbrowse. Two examples, Keeboo and Octopus, each require a tutorial, while others require software installs and more complicated registration processes. You do, however, get some neat features and pretty interfaces for all the frustration.

Although I found it hard to use Octopus.com to pick my own URLs — the site kept pushing me toward content from Octopus partner sites — I did appreciate the community emphasis that helps users browse the metabrowsing of other users. Check out this Harry Potter fan page, for instance. The similarly complicated Keeboo also offers spiffy tools for setting up annotated web tours that other users can follow. For my simple morning coffee, though, nothing beats Quickbrowse.com. Take a look for yourself.

-- THERESA RILEY