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18 April 2007
So, what's so special about Vox? It seems really hyped in metafilter and here too. Does it deserve all that attention? Why?
You know, Memo, I've been wondering the same. I'm using Vox for a blog that is friends-only, and the only really good thing I can say about it is that it's good with letting you know what your friends are up to. Then again, LJ does the same ... though I suppose it's missing the trend factor.
Also, every time I use Vox I have to open FireFox, because it gets super-cranky with Safari. Hmph.
I like Vox because it is easy to use and it (your blog) doesn't have to be about anything except your own personal self expression. I enjoy the blogs of my neighborhood because they are written by interesting people with interesting things to say, show and share.
I'm using Vox as a supplimentary blog, one focused on what I'm reading. The built-in mech for inserting books (cover images linked to Amazon) and so on is useful for such a purpose.
Beyond that, I'm willing to give Vox a try because I really like Six Apart as a company.
I have a deep distrust of putting 'my stuff' on pages hosted by someone else. It's a control freak thing I guess. ;) I get the convinience, but then like when yahoo bought egroups and all my mailinglists got truly fubared, things can get really screwy under new managment. I'd hate to see that happen to my daily blog, my photo-collection, my frineds, my mailinglists, my home movies.. Yeah, prettymuch my anything.
It's hyped on Mefi because mathowie is close friends with the main guys at Six Apart.
Equally, as with Twitter, people like picking up some tech that's been around for ages and acting like it's suddenly supercool because it's being presented in a more blogger-friendly manner.
Also, along with Twitter and MySpace and the rest - it's useful and fun for as long as all your friends continue to use it.
getoffmylawn, that could be achieved by any of the dozens of good blog webpages.
Oh! And I wouldn't call Vox accounts "blogs", although many do, they're journals. That's always been the essential difference between LiveJournal and all it offered, and the rest of the blogosphere. Blogs and journals are quite distinct things. Journals are more community-orientated, private, personal records of someone's life; they have things like friends lists, locked posts and more general day-to-day details.
The reason that I suspect many people warmed so quickly to Vox was that they didn't realise that they could run a journal in this blog-heavy online world and what they're celebrating isn't a piece of software but in-fact a style of online communication they'd previously shunned.
I agree with Miko. I found it wholly counter-intuitive and the private-journaling functionality was not sufficiently superior to more intuitive services (like livejournal, for instance) to keep me trying to get accustomed to it.
I started a page and abandoned it. I find it pretty terrible to navigate.
Same here. All the integration with Flickr and such is nice, but the thing is very slow, all the themes available are hideously cutesy, and they force people to get an account before they can comment on your posts, which is just rude.
Generally, I think it's just meant as a LiveJournal for people who would be embarrassed to admit to using LiveJournal.
Vox is easy to use, easy to change the look of it (you can use your own header graphics now), easy to add media you're interested in sharing (books, photos, music, videos). They're working on adding the ability to add a blogroll (YAY!). I don't like the fact people have to have a Vox account to comment, but it certainly cuts down on comment spam.
Using Movable Type, CSS, HTML, etc. at your own url is nice (I've done that as well), but at this point I don't want the hassle. I've also used Blogger, LiveJournal and a couple other no longer live systems/software and, at this point in my blogging (which is really journalling, but whatever), I like Vox best.
I like Vox for the simple reason that it is NOT myspace. I need to get the squirrels back up to speed on Vox too, cuz lately I have been paying more attention to other things.
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