Gene Marks recently wrote a piece in BusinessWeek entitled, “Tech Solutions Your Small Biz Can’t Use.” Being the IT Manager of a small business (less than 200 employees) I loved his entertaining style and agreed with most of his points.

However, I take exception to his opinion on RSS feeds. Gene writes that the RSS feeds are ‘displayed in an overly large browser window that winds up distracting more than informing.’ I think the problem is the method used to display the feeds. We ran across this in our business and did a litle research.

After evaluating several RSS feed displaying mechanisms, we decided to use ‘The RSS Feeds Toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer‘ from Diodia sSoftware. Yes, I know I just alienated many of you FireFox users.

What we like about the product besides the fact that it is free is that it lets you restrict your feeds display to a very small single line display under the IE menu bar. You control the content of the feeds and ignore or click on them as they come up. A simple down-arrow click shows you the feeds for the past hour or two, depending on how many feeds you have.

RSS feeds are a good thing and a great invention. Computer dudes are expected to keep up with what’s happening in the industry. Scanning headlines is just one of the ways we acomplish this. RSS feeds and a great feed reader make the job easier and the free Diodia feed toolbar makes it easier for busy geeks like me.

What do you think? Have you tried the Diodia feeds toolbar and do you like it? If not, what do you recommend?