The Flock browser is based and built on from Mozilla, the same engine that powers the popular browser Firefox. But even so the two web browsers are very much different. Flock’s slogan is “the social web browser.” And that is very much true. Flock is a browser for more social-minded people and bloggers, like me, who like to keep everything just a few mouse clicks away.

With the Flock browser you can stay connected with all your friends from the major social websites such as Digg, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter, for example. You can easily share photos, links, text and videos with your friends. With its built-in blog editor you can post to your blog over at Blogger, Livejournal, Typepad, WordPress and many more. Flock also has an awesome RSS reader, which looks great if you got a larger monitor.

And with Flock’s eco-edition you can browse the web a little “greener.”

The Flock eco-edition is packed from the start with green blogs, green RSS-feeds, and news sites such as National Geographic, Treehugger, Ecorazzi, Green Yahoo! and many others.

If you decide to use the eco-edition 10% of all search engine-earnings generated by you and others who use the same edition will go towards an environmental charity.

“Flock believes in providing users who download the Flock Eco-Edition a means to give back by donating 10% of search proceeds to the environmental charity of choice, as deemed by the voting of the community of Flock’s Eco-Edition users at the end of this year. Flock makes money when people search through the browser. So the more you search via Flock Eco-Edition, the more we’re committing to give back.”

The eco-edition will also come with its own “green” skin. I personally don’t like this skin. And because somehow you can’t change to the more pleasant and default Flock browser skin I had to delete the eco-edition and download the default Flock browser. Of course I still kept all the green bookmarks and RSS-feeds.

The Flock eco-edition is a great browser if you can tolerate the “green” skin it comes with. It does misses a few good features that it’s “cousin” Firefox 3 has, but I guess that will be fixed when Flock 2 is released. I really recommend this browser to bloggers or people who often hang out at places such as Digg, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The browser is free to download and use. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

On October 15th the second Blog Action Day will occur. Last year bloggers united for the environment. This year’s topic will be poverty. The new campaign was launched last Friday but already now over 2000 blogs with an audience of over 3500000 people has registered as participators to this year’s event.

“It’s been almost a year since, with your help, we held the smashingly successful Blog Action Day 2007, and as of a few hours ago, our 2008 campaign has officially begun. This year our theme is “Poverty” and we’ll be encouraging bloggers around the world to once again explore this issue on your blogs on October 15th.”

Green Blog participated in the event last year, and we will of course participate this year also. Because just like Al Gore says, you can’t solve climate change without dealing with poverty:

“Earlier this year, Bono and I spoke about the intersection between the extreme poverty in the developing world – especially in Africa – and the climate crisis. It is impossible to solve one of these issues without dealing with the other.”

Other more popular and well-known blogs that will participate includes blogs such as TechCrunch.com, ReadWriteWeb.com, Mashable.com, SmashingMagazine.com, GigaOm.com, Jauhari.net, Problogger.net, CopyBlogger.com, DailyBlogTips.com, ZenHabits.net, Inhabitat.com, VentureBeat.com, Mentalfloss.com, PronetAdvertising.com and TorrentFreak.com.

Elena Valenciano, a prominent member of the Spanish Parliament and spokesperson for the Human Rights Committee, will also be taking part in Blog Action Day.

Are you a frequent RSS-reader? Yes? No? It doesn’t matter! Now you don’t just have to read to get your weekly dose of green news, blogs and rants. It’s time to start listen. It’s time to discover the green podcasts.

The folks over at iTunes have collected some of the best environment related podcasts from around the web in one nice, free, corner.

You will find green podcasts from the famous Grist and TreeHugger to the Lazy Environmentalist and The Sierra Club.

To be able to subscribe to any of the podcasts you will need to download and install iTunes. It’s free and works on both Windows (XP or Vista) and Mac OS X.

To tell you the truth I haven’t been able to blog about the environment today (besides this post). I am sitting here with an awful cold. It has everything, from a soaring throat, headaches, and fever to a stomach that doesn’t seem to like any kind of food today. So please understand why I’ll save my posts until later this week when I get better.

But there is an upside. You haven’t read this post in vain. I will let the award winning (and hopefully soon-to-be-president) environment activist Al Gore speak for me in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

It probably first started when Discovery Communications bought TreeHugger earlier this summer. That meant the start of a more commercialized TreeHugger. Cause in the end all that matters for Discovery Communications is that they make money from TreeHugger. So doing paid blog posts wasn’t probably a hard choice to make.

But what exactly is paid blog posts then? Well, paid blog posts are actually advertisement posted as a regular post on a blog. Most blogs that does this usually disclose that the post in question is a paid advertisement.

I personally don’t see anything wrong with TreeHugger doing a few paid blog posts now and then. It’s sad that they do, but it’s not a problem, at least not for me.

The problem is that they do not tell their visitors that what they read is an advertisement from a company that has paid the author to post about certain things. And that is just stupidity and disrespect for your readers who trust that you give them truthful content that isn’t mixed in some way.

TreeHugger needs to get it acts together and properly disclose that the blog post you are currently reading is a paid advertisement. Otherwise TreeHuggers good reputation is at stake.

Here are two examples of paid blog posts on TreeHugger for those who are interested:

- In An Absolut World…Everything is Downloadable
- In An Absolut World: David Graas

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Some of the top notch blogs that will participate are SEOMoz, Lifehacker, ProBlogger, ZenHabits, Copyblogger and many more.

This is a great idea and initiative – Green Blog has already registered our blog to participate and we really hope you will too. But, why stop at only talking and discussing the environment on one day? Why not go the whole way with your blog or website? Wouldn’t it be great if an majority of the participating blogs and sites moved to a green web host on or around October 15th? That would truly make an impact on people and especially web host companies.

So if you are going to participate in the Blog Action Day, don’t just talk about the environment – help save it by choosing a green web host.

The huge, award-winning, green blog TreeHugger was recently acquired by Discovery Communications.

Close to four years ago, TreeHugger was founded with the goal of helping to push sustainability into the mainstream. Today, as an award-winning Top 20 blog having served over 50 million pages, we like to believe that we’ve played a part in pushing green towards its tipping point. Today, we are proud to announce another big step toward that goal; Discovery Communications has acquired TreeHugger.

This means that more money will be invested in TreeHugger and their Digg-lookalike site Hugg. In return TreeHugger will help Discovery Communications with the new site Planet Green that is currently being built.

http://www.treehugger.com
http://www.hugg.com
http://www.discovery.com