I’ve been testing the Spawn of FireFox called “Flock“. Flock is basically Firefox dressed up for Social Media sites. if your the type of person who loves sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and others then this may be your dream browser! It is these types of sites that this browser is made for… This is not to say it is its only use though.

Flock has some nice features for bloggers. It has a cool feature-full writer for all the top blogging platforms. I never liked it much though, it just was not what i am used to. It would be great for people who use Blogger… But for wordpress users it will not offer everything you need. If you like me you have some plugins and some of these plugins might change a few things on the fly, of course this writer has none of things.

It does have some nice sharing features for sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. It also has a nice way of integrating the browser with Social sites, you can simply drag any content like a whole web-page or photo into a sidebar which has all your friends. It will then send the content to them and hopefuly they will check it out. Features like this is what really sets it apart from Firefox. It has a cool top menu which is great for quickly checking mail, RSS feeds, and your friends.

One feature that looks really cool is how you can search for media. This tool searches sites like Google and youtube for Videos and images. It then displays them in a nice top menu with imasges and other info.

The only thing I really use is Twitter and RSS feeds. The RSS reader is great, it is one of the only real features I used. I found the email checker a bit frustrating to use though

Flock also gives you your own home page. This homepage is hosted on your computer. It grabs your feeds and other content and displays it as a sort of MSN/AOL/iGoogle type page and gives you everything you need in one easy to use page.

Conclusion

Flock is simple not a browser that is built for me. It is made for the Facebook generation who love to share things and spend a lot of time chatting. For me I would only really use Twitter which I can find a better plug-in for FireFox ( TwitterFox).

Like twitter most of the features can be found in Plug-ins for FireFox. The only real selling point is the way Flock displays these plug-ins. It also has a nice Homepage which was nice to use… But it is not really anything you cant get for free from Google or Yahoo!.

For me I think I’ll stick with FireFox and Chrome. Maybe when I get all hip and start using all the social media sites that come and die I will switch… But don’t expect this for sometime

What is blogging now? When I first started back in 2001 it was just a way to log your daily lives or moan about something that effects you… You had big company workers writing up about how their company sucked, people trying to work out their own issues… These days its turned into a way for people to claim how much money they make and write up paid reviews. Blogging has lost its personality and is now just turning into the old websites we had crammed down our necks.

Can you really tell me the difference between a website and a blog now? You could have a few years ago but now… You will be hard pushed to look up on a blog directory and not have the biggest “blogs” be marketing type or some form of sales type website.

I only read a few blogs now, mainly because no one apart from a few really do blog, you see no real personality behind the blog apart from someone rubbing their hands together trying to find some sneaky way of getting some extra dollars out of you.

The reason I was wondering is this I just checked my RSS reader and went through all my feeds and cleaned out everything that sucked… I am now down to only 4 feeds!

1. One of them is a clasic (PostSecret) which is all about real blogging (With pics).
2. The other is a blog I found around a year ago and has one of the biggest real personalitys around (Rebellious Arab Girl ®).
3. The other is a blog I sadly need to really catch up on Its called I am You and was one of my fave reads a quite a few months back… I really need to go back and atch up (Like I do with Rebellios)
4. The next is a blogger/Auther/Comic Aurther (Neil Gaiman’s Journal) who always manages to amaze me. He has no real need to blog but does it for the sole reason of what Blogging is meant to be about… Expressing yourself.

I did have a lot of feeds from very good authers… Sadly most have now closed or just died Did they die from just personal reasons? Maybe… But I also think its because these real blogs get less exposure and no real way to find blogs to connect too.
Yes you have many sites such as BlogCatalog and Entrecard to use… But they get flooded with spam and end up being run with the “Blog v2″ spam sites and just old fasioned websites but with a blog identity.

So this is just something for everyone to think about:

Are you really running a blog? (Blog = Web Log)