Participation Literacy

We started Flock to build tools that empower people and smooth out some of the more hairy parts of living and working online. As it is, we live and breathe this stuff everyday and wanted better tools to do the things that we love doing online.

Flock is a Web browser with built in capabilities for folksonomy. This means that they have integrated Web services such as Delicious and Flickr in the browser as well as smooth ways to blog. Flock is really built on the Firefox engine, so all Web sites that work with Firefox will also work with Flock, and they render pages in the same way.

The screenshot shows the main navigation area in the Flock browser. Most menu items are the same as in Firefox, but there are some interesting differences. The blue button with one single star is the bookmark button. When this is pushed a dialog box turns up giving you the chance of naming and tagging the bookmark. Afterwards the button turns orange. Every time you visit a Web page you already have in your bookmark collection, the button is orange, otherwise it is blue. The bookmark you just created will turn up in your Delicious account on the Web.

The button with three stars opens a bookmark manager. This function is actually a manager of Delicious bookmarks, integrated with the Flock browser. The manager uses the Web bookmarks but adds several layers of functions. The Bookmarks can be divided into collections, and RSS feeds are seamlessly integrated. Clicking on an RSS link displays the posts on a well formatted Web page.

The button that looks like a feather pen switches on a blog editor, which can be configured to work with most blog services and software on the market. Blogging is also easily done by marking some interesting text on a Web page, right click and choose “Blog this”. Then the blog editor, which looks like an email client, turns up and the text you marked is already in the editor with the link to the Web page. Just write something and press Publish to send it to your blog. There is also integration with Flickr photo sharing service. Drag a picture from Flickr into the blog editor and send it to your blog with just a click.

The most exciting feature, perhaps, is called The Shelf, see the screenshot. It is like a scrapbook to where you can drag Web contents like images, text or URLs. From the shelf it is easy to drag things to the blog editor. Flock gives the blogger a workflow very far from traditional Web page editing. The blogger becomes a knowledge synthesizer, who surfs the Internet, picking up interesting pieces of knowledge, putting them into a new context and in that process creates new knowledge.