In blogging there is often tight coupling between reading other people’s blogs and writing your own blog entries. If you happen to be reading other blogs through a feed reader, you might even be able to easily drop pieces of other people’s blogs (that are coming in as RSS or Atom items) into your own blog editor.
For example, on Windows, using SharpReader[91][92][93]reblogging), as shown in Figure 5-4.
Figure 5.4. Figure 5-4. On a Windows desktop, SharpReader is looking at one of Udell’s posts, along with a right-click invocation of w.bloggar to send this entry to a blog.
Since reblogging often produces nothing more than trivial republication of other people’s words, it’s easy to forget that this flow of content is actually undergird by a feedback loop of reading and writing. When you use Flickr’s blog functionality, content goes from Flickr to a blog, but there’s no easy flow of content from blogs back into Flickr. By contrast, the combination of weblogs that syndicate their contents through feeds and feed aggregators that are also blog clients means that what you read can flow easily into what you write. In the next section, I’ll discuss Flock, a web browser that facilitates this flow between reading and writing by building in greater integration with blogging and various social media web sites.