The developer preview of Flock is now available. I’m writing this post from within the built-in blogging tool. It’s pretty cool. I’ve used an extension for Firefox before (Blog This) that would allow me to write to my blog easily from the browser, but this feels even more integrated. There is actually a button in the toolbar to launch the blog post window.  Another cool feature: within the posting window is a feature called “TopBar” which allows me to toggle between a blog toolbar and a Flickr toolbar. The Flickr toolbar allows me to drop and drag photos from Flickr right into my blog post. I’m not sure exactly what the blog TopBar is good for, but I’ll figure it out.

The other feature I’m excited about is the The Shelf, sort of a scrapbook where I can collect notes as I’m browing. I can see this coming in really handy when I’m getting ready to compose a new blog post. No more hunting around various Web pages looking for the right link/text, always worrying that I’ll accidentally load something into the browser window where I’m posting. Now I can clip interesting stuff while I’m browsing and then have it all handy when I go to write.

Favorites are integrated with my delicious account so that I can access them through the browser. This feature seems a little sluggish right now, but it is only a developer preview, after all.

Oh, and another cool feature: Flock indexes every page I visit, so that I can go back later and do full-text searches of my History. Since I’m always losing stuff I found online before, I think this could be very useful.

So, go get Flock-ed!