What the Flock?  A new Web browser?  That’s right – the folks at a new company called Flock have developed a new Web browser built on Mozilla (the guys behind the beloved Firefox Web browser).  Flock is a new browser made especially for bloggers and social networking freaks like me (and probably you).

Flock is a powerful Web browser built on the Firefox architecture.  It has everything Firefox has (including extensions), but it also has everything a social network power user could want – including a built in sidebar they call the “People Sidebar” that connects you to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more, a “MediaBar” that lets you subscribe to your friends photos, videos and more and alerts you when they upload new media anywhere on the Web, and probably coolest of all – the Facebook SocialBar stays active at the bottom of the browser, alerting you of new IMs and Facebook updates, even when you visit other sites besides Facebook.

Don’t worry, you can use your Firefox Extensions in Flock!
Admitedly, I first ran into Flock a couple months ago and didn’t even give it a chance.  I’m so dependant on my Firefox extensions that I can’t live without them.  But what I didn’t realize the first time is that any Firefox extension works with Flock.  In fact, to add them to Flock you visit the same Add-ons page on the Mozilla Website and install them the same way as Firefox.  Everything from Shareaholic, Better Gmail, PingFire, PowerTwitter, and more work perfectly for me in Flock just as they do in Firefox.

The list of integrated features goes on and on – from Webmail, to RSS feeds, and more.  If you use Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking sites – or if you’re a blogger – then try Flock and you’ll quickly realize how easier it makes using the Internet.  Bloggers will especially love the way it connects with your blog (whether that be Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc).  In fact, this blog post was created using the Flock Blog Editor.

Go to http://www.flock.com to download Flock and try it out.

Even when Chrome comes out with Extensions its going to be hard to pull me away from Flock – we’ll just have to wait and see.  Try it out and let me know in the comments how you like it.

PubMatic, the ad network optimization company, seems to be putting their recent round of funding to good use.  Yesterday they announced a new feature called Ad Inspector for their Premium clients.  Ad Inspector allows publishers to run “forensic” tests on all ads displaying on their Web site, providing them with information identifying which ad network or exchange served a particular ad, as well as any ad networks that defaulted in the process.

Anyone who runs multiple ad networks on a site can tell you that when there is a problem with an ad, it’s almost impossible to try and figure out where that ad came from.  Many networks don’t give you visibility into which ads may be running on your account at any given time, and the same campaign could easily come from two different networks.  You see an ad that violates your Web site’s policies and tracking it down is such a difficult task it’s often not worth worrying about.  PubMatic has changed that with Ad Inspector.

“Tracking down where an ad comes from and stopping the inappropriate ones does not have to be a difficult task,” says PubMatic co-founder and CEO, Rajeev Goel.

“PubMatic Ad Inspector, available as a FireFox add-on, is geared for ad operations professionals in large publishers who manage complex environments with numerous sites, multiple ad networks and multiple ad units. Information from ads on their sites can be captured in a snapshot through the Ad Inspector application.” – Read more from the PubMatic press release.

If you haven’t heard about PubMatic, you really need to check them out. I was at the Ad Revenue conference last year in San Francisco, and spent some good time talking to Rajeev.  He’s got a passion to change the advertising industry and provide tools and resources to better the way we operate.

PubMatic is a meta ad server.  It sits between you and individual ad networks to provide intelligent services that maximize your revenue and minimize the complexity of managing your ad inventory.  When your Website calls an ad from an ad network, PubMatic chooses in real time which network is going to pay the highest CPM, and delivers the ad from that network.  They also offer many tools and help to make sure your ads are optimized for the highest return.