The world wide web has grown - you need a new browser

Long gone are the days when the web was just used to read information, it is now used for interacting with others, finding things out and developing communities.

To join in this web of activity, you need a few free bits of software, and a little bit of knowledge. This blog aims to give you the first few bits of information, and then will facilitate discussion of what works, what doesn't, and how to do things.

The first thing you need is a browser. There are a few big browsers available that will do te job, and I think it is worth trying out a few different ones, and not committing yourself to one. For instance I am writing this post in Flock, but I also have firefox and safari (mac user) open at the same time for different pages.

To decide which browser to use you need to ask youself a few questions:

• Do you want to share your favourites?
• Do you want to reed rss feeds?
  
• Do you want to blog?
• Do you want to share photos?

If you say yes to any of the questions above then you would be best advised to choose Flock or Firefox (Internet explorer 7 may have some of these featurse, but I haven't used it much yet).

Flock

I prefer Flock, as it allows me to publish blog posts quickly from within the browser, and collect images and text from the web, for later use. you can download it here http://flock.com/download/

When you have downloaded it and opened it you can do all kinds of clever things with it. The first thing to do, is to get a del.icio.us account and set up favourite sharing. Favourite sharing is when you let others see the pages you add to your favourites, it is useful as your account lives on the internet and not on your computer, which means you ca access it from anywhere. I use mine at work and at home, so whenever I see anything for me or my job, I add it and can see it where I need it. You can look at my favourites here http://del.icio.us/harrrydavies it is a bit of a mess at the moment, but I will be tidying it up in the next few weeks.

Flock lets you add favourites to de.icio.us quickly and easily whilst staying within the browser. If you are using firefox, IE, safari, opera there are easy ways to add buttons to your browser, but for me, flock is the most elegant.

The next post will be on using flock for RSS and I will let you know how I got on tidying my favourites. Hopefully I will have added some favourites to this blog by then too.

Blogged with Flock