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For the past couple of days, I've been playing with Flock, the new web browser. Not so much for its capabilities as a browser - and it is pretty good at that - but more its capability as a blog editing tool.

Even though it is still in development (nice warning when you download the installer: "If you have made it this far, chances are that you are aware of the risks associated with software that is nestled somewhere between the alpha and beta states"), it is very polished overall. As a browser, it certainly stands up against Firefox and Opera, not to mention Internet Explorer.

But I'm most impressed with using it to create and publish blog posts. Very easy indeed - easy to set up with your blog account and very easy to use with its clear WYSIWIG editor.

So far, I've successfully created and published posts to three different blogs - NevOn 2.0, my soon-to-be new blog home (running on WordPress 1.5.2), NevOn 2.0 Experimental (Movable Type 3.2) and this blog on TypePad. I'm writing this post with Flock.

It's not perfect at the moment by any means (eg, odd line breaks when posting to the WordPress blog) and I wouldn't use it as a replacement for ecto for Windows, my current and preferred offline editing tool.

But it's certainly worth serious consideration as a blog editing tool.

I've not yet discovered half of its potential (dragging and dropping web content, connecting with Flickr, etc) but I will get to that soon enough.

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology. Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson's blog: NevilleHobson.com.