Last year at FETC I learned about the new browser Flock in one of the sessions by David Warlick. Warlick mentioned it again at EdTech this past fall, and I’m just now getting around to exploring its potential.
Flock is based on the Mozilla Firefox browser, and has extensions especially tuned for Web 2.0. There are the features one would expect from Firefox, including tabbed browsing and add-on extensions. However, there is also a direct blog editing interface, and an interface for both Flickr and Photobucket photo services. There is also a cool RSS aggregator that places your feeds into easy-to-read columns.
Blogging couldn’t be easier with Flock. It takes only a minute or two to set up the accounts for your blogging service and your photos service. The blogging interface is fairly simple, and allows users some WYSIWYG editing while also allowing the user to have direct manipulation of the HTML code.
My personal preference is to use my regular WordPress editing interface since I can see my categories a bit easier and have access to more WYSIWYG elements. Plus, if so configured, the images from your photo service can be placed across the top of the window so that one can drag and drop them into any web form. This makes it a snap to simply drag the photos into my blog posts, as seen in the picture below. Flock not only embeds the photo into the post, but creates a link back to the photo page in Flickr. There is even an option to drag the photo into bulletin board posts in [img][/img] BBCode. Pretty cool.
