I’ve been sporadically using Flock for last two days and it’s an interesting take on a modern browser and social computing. Two features that I found most useful are bookmarks (or favorites, as flock calls them) integration with del.icio.us and history index. Especially the last one.

Flock indexes every downloaded page, so when you start typing a query in search window, it presents a list of matches from your history. Everytime I try to find a page in my browser history, I find myself amazed at how many pages I read every day.

It’s one of those in hindsight obvious features that I hope, expect really, to see in other browsers fairly soon. It’s just makes sense.

It’s less obvious how you make money with software that you can’t charge for. Opera demonstrated (and Flock intends to follow ) there are other business models that work at least for now. I hope it’ll also work for Flock.

I finally got a new machine yesterday and I immediately installed SuSE 10 on it. Ubuntu seems to be the flavor of the moment, but I was never much fond of Debian and even less of GNOME.

So far I really like the experience, the only exception being a problem with a keyboard. For some unknown reason my old PS/2 keyboard doesn’t get recognized in Linux and therefore simply doesn’t work.

It’s the first time in almost a decade of being a Linux user to experience something like this and I have no idea what could cause this and how to fix it. Google hasn’t helped either, so if anyone has any idea about this, I’d be immensely grateful if you could share it.

I’m using an USB keyboard for now, which works. Well, sort of. It seems to be impossible to buy a decent USB keyboard in Slovenia so I’m stuck with this piece of crap for now. Truth be told, this was just the cheapest of bad options.

I’m not ashamed to admit, although I maybe should be, that Thursday evenings are reserved for TV. I’m a sucker for good detective series and it’s then when most of them are on. I haven’t really noticed until recently how important a theme song is to set the mood and I got to think more about it yesterday, while watching CSI: NY (by the way, CSI: Miami is just crap and should be scrapped).

Shouldn’t every website and program have its own soundtrack?

I’m not talking about annoying muzak of flash intros. I despise them as much as the next person and much good would be done if they all disappeared tomorrow. I’m thinking of soundtracks more as a development tool. When we are building stuff (websites, programs or whatever), we try to imagine things like who our typical user will be and what kind of mood or feeling are we trying to provoke, which is not always easy. It’s easy to create a bland descriptions alright, but I find them of limited help when trying to really imagine, to connect with what they’ll experience.

We all listen to music that talks to us. And it also talks about us. Isn’t it sometimes just easier to describe what we are trying to do with a song or two?

If we did that, what would happen when listening to them while using the website?

I think a good website would blend with a soundtrack previously made to capture its emotional experience. If it doesn’t, then there’s a problem and if I’m sure that soundtrack is just right, then I should change my website until I don’t feel a dichotomy anymore.