The Consulate General of Israel in New York is on Twitter, and will hold a Twitter news conference this afternoon.

Consulate General of Israel in New York

Social media guru Peter Shankman has an innovative idea up, called Help a Reporter. The premise is simple. Build a network of people on-line who know something. Have writers and reporters submit their information needs to the site. Twice a day, broadcast the current list of needs with contact info to the membership.

I’ve signed up, and responded to one request already. Many of the requests are very specific, regional or for a certain professional profile.

Shankman asks only one thing, that you reply to a request only if your ability to assist is right on target. The system will function only if writers and reporters experience responses from experts and not a lot of BS. In return, he promises that there will be no spam, ever.

If you’ve ever read a news story or saw something in a book or magazine that you knew was factually untrue, then you’ll want to sign up at this site. You may be able to prevent the next mistake. It is also a good way to promote yourself as an expert in a given topic. If Larry Johnson can do it, so can you.

Via Conversation Agent

Maria Reyes-McDavis, the Web Success Diva, caught my eye with a Tweet about a browser called Flock. I had never heard of it but I have rapidly tired of IE7 as my browser.

I went to IE7 when Netscape announced it was folding its browser. Since Firefox 3.0 was coming out, and did get released to a huge (8 million downloads plus) audience, I was leaning towards it.

I checked out the Diva’s post, and from there went to Flock’s website.

Flock introduces itself as “the social web browser”. Built on the open source Mozilla platform, it incorporates logged in access to many social networking sites. For now, I’m up on Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and Flickr.

Internet users spend a lot of time going from one site to the next, keeping up with a variety of friends and interests. Flock pulls all of your favorite people, places and content together in a convenient view and delivers a more personal experience of the web, where its users are more easily connected to what’s important to them.

Right now the best thing, of many, that I have noticed is that all of the annoying glitches with using the WordPress dashboard to post to ANSJ seem to have resolved. Flock seems to have a lot less problems with javascript and java apps than IE7 did.

And, pages, all sorts of pages, load faster.

I’m typing this and Flock is spell checking my work. I know, there are other ways to do it, but this is without me having to DO anything else.

It’s a great RSS feed reader and finds the feeds all by itself.

I don’t watch a lot of video, but Flock is set up to have your favorite media right at your finger tips.

And, it will serve as your e-mail client.

As a Mozilla based product, it can grow without limits. There are already a number of add-ons and I am certain that more are to come.

It’s a free download. Flock – free.

Perfect? No, it doesn’t make coffee.

I’m sure I’ll find imperfections as I learn more about this innovative web browser. But, at a point where I needed a comprehensive web browsing solution since I’m on the computer most of the day, I found Flock.