http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...2789_tc024.htm

for one, it makes blogging a snap by eliminating the need to do arcane coding in order to post, change fonts or add photos. Right click the mouse on a Web page, and a blogging wizard comes up that automatically creates links, citations, and quotes that are ready to insert into a blog. A horizontal bar on the browser also can load photos from the photo-sharing site Flickr, so they can be simply dragged and dropped into the blog post.

HANDY HISTORY. Moreover, Flock makes it easy to create online bookmarks for Web sites. Visit a Web site and click a "+" button on one of the browser's toolbars, and that site is saved to a personalized list on the social bookmarks Web site http://del.icio.us./.

Those bookmarks can be tagged with useful descriptions and shared with others. Flock also lets people create watchlists of people whose bookmarks they like and form groups with people who link to particular tags. Flock also keeps a history of every Web page a user visits, so they can be found easily later.

Even in raw test mode, Flock and its blogging tools in particular are drawing rave reviews from tech-savvy users. "Pure magic," says J. Michael Arrington, general partner at Archimedes Ventures, who co-writes the blog TechCrunch. "It's a beautiful application, and they're a bunch of smart guys." Even Robert Scoble, Microsoft's most famous blogger, has called the Flock browser "awesome."

PERSONAL TOUCH. The most innovative thing about Flock is that it's trying to do away with the notion of "browsing." Co-founder and Marketing Vice-President Geoffrey Arone says the term is an increasingly irrelevant description of what people do online. Essentially, Flock's software is intended to serve less as a window into static Web content than as a customizable conduit for participatory Web services, from Flickr to del.icio.us to the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

It's not an entirely new idea. Tech-savvy folks can customize their Web experience with a number of new tools. Firefox, and now Internet Explorer, for instance, allow people to add "extensions" to their browser. They can, say, add a new search-engine box to their browsers, even alter the appearance and features of individual Web sites. Possible additions include blocking ads or filling in personal account information.

But Cowan notes that not everyone wants to trick out their Web browser. "Most people just want to drive their car off the lot," he says. So Flock's aim is to create software that makes it dead-easy for regular Web users to customize an experience with just a few clicks. The Flock software will be offered free, both to the general public and to

its already out -see the wikipedia site or search