brainsnorkel.com

I’ve been experimenting with a frivolous blog on Six Apart’s new free blogging service: Vox.

I have never held a MySpace or LiveJournal account, so trying out Vox and quickly picking up a couple of new “neighbors” with histories and identities was pretty novel. I was immediately struck by the social emphasis compared with this blog. Don’t get me wrong, regular readers — I’m talking about comments from random strangers who wash up here after an MSN search gone awry and spammer botnets with their infectious enthusiasm for breast size alteration and pharmacy-related spelling bees.

Through design or accident, Vox seems to be a MySpace for grownups or LiveJournal with more glitz.

The underlying theme of Vox is combining free blogspace with a walled garden of bloggy social interaction. You are coaxed with alluring content and user interface design to explore and link. As Julie the Cruise Director was to The Love Boat, the Vox homepage is to Vox — issuing daily blogging topic suggestions to the listless horde.

Vox defines your relationship to each of your fellow Vox inhabitants as either neighbor, friend, family or no association. Your neighborhood is visible to other people so they can view the kinds (and quantities) of relationships you have.

You can add a relationship between your account and someone else’s with any of these categories. You need to be a neighbor to also be tagged as friend or family. Neighbors, friends and family are similar/identical to Flickr’s simple access levels. You can restrict visibility of information about yourself, posts, music and other media to people with these categorizations.

Adding someone to your neighborhood is a bit of a strange metaphor. In its favour, it doesn’t require you to leap the emotional hurdle of declaring friendship with someone, it’s just an indication (to them) that you are interested in their content. Adding someone to your neighborhood means your default views will begin to show their public post activity.

If you change your mind about Vox, you are free to cancel your account or delete posts and other content. You don’t seem to be able to export your blog content other than through your (atom) feed. I was suspicious that I might have missed a “Vox pwns j00!” clause in the terms of service, but Vox’s Terms of Service clearly indicate that you retain ownership of your content:

CONTENT SUBMITTED
Six Apart does not claim ownership of the Content you place on your Six Apart Blog Site. By submitting Content to Six Apart for inclusion on your Six Apart Blog Site, you grant Six Apart a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your Blog Site on Six Apart’s Internet properties. This license exists only for as long as you continue to be a Six Apart customer and shall be terminated at the time your Blog Site is terminated.

Vox provides a pretty easy to use WYSIWYG post editor which has a few foibles, but is certainly state of the art for blog editing. You can link to, and embed video, images, music and (links to) books and manage simple databases (collections) of these as well. Your collections and media are usually a part of the visible information about you — providing an on-line version of a vanity mix-tape.

Although Vox seems as though it is marketed as a blogging engine it is not a terribly good choice. For a start, commenting on posts is only open to Vox members and you can only choose your blog’s aesthetics from pre-packaged themes (maybe that’s actually a good thing…). If you want a free no-nonsense blog, WYSIWYG editing and easy-to-use bells and whistles and open access to comments, then use Blogger or a similar service. If you want a fun forum for social interaction with old and new friends — Vox might be the ticket.