Must blog more in 2009

I've always felt fairly ambivalent about blogging. So thus far I haven't done much of it. Last year I discovered and really enjoyed the 'micro-blogging' experience of Twitter. Having an iPhone made it all the more visceral and now it's my most-used iPhone app by a long way.

Twitter has made me think differently about blogging. I really love the instant and micro nature of Twitter making almost like a public notepad recording my smallest of thoughts. This style really works well for the way my brain actually works. (OK well it could also be the ADD).

Now I'm wanting to post things that have a little more meat on their bones than 140 characters allows. I also want to practice my writing, since I kind of enjoy, but don't do nearly enough of it.

Another reason to blog more is to raise my digital profile. I recently (out of curiousity more than vanity) setup a google alert on my own name. The other Josh Price's out there who appear in this are an interesting bunch of fellows, and I wouldn't want anyone googling me and getting them if you know what I mean. (Apologies to the other Josh Price's if you're reading this....). So I'm going to attempt to raise my level of personal SEO. Since I own my own .com domain then this should be pretty straightforward.

I've created a tumblr account as well which I'm not yet sure what I'll use for. It appears to fill the gap between Twitter and blog posts.

The upshot of all of this is that I am committing to blogging more in 2009. I expect you all to hold me to this.

Flock: a whole new browser experience

I've been flicking between Firefox 3b5, Safari 3 and Opera on my Mac for a while now. Today I found a brand new "Social" browser called Flock. After a few minutes I had my Facebook and Flickr contacts listed in my sidebar. I also connected my Gmail, my blog and my delicious bookmarks. Although I've only touched the surface of what seems to be quite a lot of interesting social features and plugins, I've come away rather impressed.

The whole social experience seems to have come together in my Flock browser in a way that I had never considered. My Facebook contacts are sorted by the most recent status updates. The sidebar interface actually feels much cleaner and more organised than Facebook. Flickr photos are presented across the top of my browser window, and changing streams is faster and more intuitive than Flickr.

Flock appears to have all the standard browser features I've gotten used to. Probably because it's built on top of Firefox. It also seems pretty snappy. I'm going to try it as my default browser and see how I like it. It can't possibly crash as often as Firefox 3 beta 5...