Oceanside, Nevada

Flock.

Say it with me kiddies.

Flock.

Just sort of rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Well okay, maybe not, but it’s the hot new topic out there in the blogosphere. Let me explain by first describing the tools I use to produce this blog.

First and foremost, I use NetNewsWire to keep up on what’s going on out there. For those who don’t know, NNW is an RSS feed reader. Rather than having to go check numerous websites on a daily basis to see what’s interesting, I let NNW do it for me. There are some other good ones, I recommend NewsFire (my favorite until I looked at NNW again) and many people are fond of Pulp Fiction and Shrook.

I use NNW to sort through my news and find things that interest me enough to comment about them on my blog. After that, I turn to ecto to actually write and post my blog posts. ecto has about a butt-load of features and I’m betting I don’t use even half of them. I can’t really comment on any other offline blogging clients because I’ve never used any, ecto rocks that hard.

When I need to open something in something other than the browser that’s built into NNW, I’m using Camino these days. It’s fast like Firefox but pretty and Mac-like like Safari so I consider it to be a best of both worlds solution. I know real geeks like Firefox but I just can’t get into it. It’s so un-Mac-like in so many small ways it always feels to me like wearing an itchy sweater.

If you’ve been reading recently you know that I have developed a fairly unhealthy fascination with del.icio.us. I won’t go into all the reasons I’m digging del.icio.us again, but it seems that every day I find a new one. The one big drawback to using del.icio.us is that it isn’t quite as fast and seamless as local bookmarks, but, for all that you get when you embrace del.icio.us, I’ll live with it. One tool I use to help manage del.icio.us is Cocoalicious (there’s a new version available, by the way)

Cocoalicious is a specialized browser for OS X that is tailored to manage your del.icio.us bookmarks. Because it’s built on web-kit you could use it as your regular browser in it’s own right, but compared to an actual tool like Safari, or Camino, it’s a little barebones. Still, for what it’s intended to do, it does a fantastic job. The only niggling complaint I have is akin to my issue with using del.icio.us with Camino (or Safari or any browser): it’s clunky. You have to do a lot of switching between apps to use your bookmarks or you have to modify the way you surf.

Then there’s Flickr, which I don’t use. I have an account, but the combination of ecto and Blog Harbor (my blog host) is good enough about photo hosting that I don’t really need it. Still Flickr is pretty cool with some nifty features in it’s own right, so you ought to check it out if you haven’t.

So, where were we going with this?

Flock.

Okay, take Firefox, with all of the coolest extensions already built-in. Graft del.icio.us onto it as the default bookmarks manager. Roll in ecto, but make it even easier to use. Add drag and drop Flickr support, transparent to the user. Shoehorn Technorati in there somewhere. Oh, and, uh, make it all automatic. As in, fire it up for the first time and Flock automagically configures all this behind the scenes stuff for you, from your accounts and passwords to your blog API.

So, in one fell swoop, I’m unburdened of Camino, ecto, and Cocoalicious. I love them all, but that would be pretty shiny. Oh, and I forgot to mention, it’s all open source and cross-platform.

Funny thing: the only feature I haven’t seen mentioned, is an RSS reader. I do about 90% of my browsing with NNW and only occasionally use Camino and I don’t think I’m the only one out there, so I hope that Flock addresses this. Firefox has “live bookmarks” which are a kind of RSS implementation that I don’t really know much about because I haven’t played with it, so maybe it’s already there.

Flock doesn’t become available until October and then it looks like it will only be for beta testers (though I may be wrong). You can sign up for an invite to test on the Flock website and hope you’re a lucky person. I hope I am.

You can check out all the buzz here, here, here, here, here, and here,

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, geek, Internet, Mac, P2P, RSS, technology

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