Flock web browser
I am making at least a temporary transition to a HP tablet PC as my primary computer for educational workshop presentations and blogging-- and as a result I've been trying out different web browsers and blogging tools. A couple of weeks ago at the Mid-America Technology Institute, Will Richardson highly recommended the Flock web browser. Flock features some nice integration of read/write web tools like blogs, social bookmarks, and photo sharing services, and so far I have been pretty pleased with its performance.
One of the best features of Flock, from my perspective as an edublogger, is the "blog this" feature. This allows a user to highlight one or more sentences (or even images) on a webpage, and then have that content automatically entered into a new blog post as a "blockquote," with an accompanying link citing the source. I particularly appreciate the way Flock allows you to copy images in addition to text, elminating the need to enter any "HTML image tag code" to make the picture appear.
Flock is also integrated with del.icio.us, which is my preferred social bookmarking service. When you save a website favorite or bookmark in Flock, you can choose to automatically have the site also added (with the "tags" you specify) to del.icio.us. The power of social bookmarking is mostly related to the NETWORKING features it offers. I have particularly enjoyed using the my network feature of del.icio.us, which displays the most recent saved websites by people within your "network." Flock's integration with Flickr also looks good, but I have not explored that yet much.
Learning to use a different operating system is a GOOD thing, and while I am (regrettably at times) no stranger to the Windows OS, I have not previously tried to blog (aside from webpage interfaces which I find a bit limiting) from a Windows computer. I have also been experimenting with Ecto, the blogging client I've used for over a year now on the Macintosh side of things, and it seems to work even better on Windows in some respects. It supports WYSIWYG post editing, a feature not to be included until Ecto 3 is released later this summer.
Most people don't like change in anything-- and computer habits are no exception. I think this is why discussions about which operating system is "best" are often so charged with emotion for people. Especially for digital immigrants, if they know how do things and feel comfortable in one computer operating environment, usually asking them to change to something new is literally analogous to asking them to start communicating 100% of the time in a different language-- in both oral and written communication. That is a tall order.
I believe knowledge is power, however, and it is a good thing for digital immigrants and digital natives alike to have comfortable fluency in a variety of computing environments. This not only includes operating systems, but web browsers as well. I think the Firefox browser seems to be faster and more responsive than Flock so far, but I have not seen the "blog this" functionality in Firefox that drew me to Flock initially.
Both Flock and Firefox are free downloads and work on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems-- so give one or both of them a try if you have not already! We all need to be multi-lingual in the 21st century computing environment!