Vox Trot
Six Apart, the fine people behind such tools as LiveJournal, Movable Type, Typepad, etc. have sent out another wave of invites for their new service, Vox, and I was lucky enough to get one.
I’ve signed up and played around for a bit, and it seems fun. It’s sort of a combination of different aspects of a lot of other social networking/blogging sites, and even integrates services from other sites (most notably Flickr and YouTube). The friends system is less of a pain than, say, MySpace, and lacks the friend approval requirement, allowing you to build your “neighborhood” from any interesting people you run across on the site, rather than having to request their approval for friendship. It also allows you to build collections of content, either your own or from offsite. You can upload audio (a nice feature, and sure to make it attractive to musicians, especially since it lacks some of the presentational drawbacks of MySpace) or post video from YouTube, and build collections of books from Amazon.
It’s customizable, but not 100% freely customizable. You have a few layout options, and a couple dozen themes (designed by Six Apart) that are based on these modular layouts. You can choose which elements appear in your sidebars, though from what I can see, you can’t control their order.
Everything on the site is organized by tagging, so you can search for, say, Seattle, and find any blog posts, photos, audio files, videos, etc. that have been tagged Seattle. Content can also be organized into collections, allowing you to group together different types of content, for example, all your vacation photos and blog posts about that vacation could belong to a single collection.
I’m not sure exactly where this new blogging site will belong in my lineup of blogs (currently, I post here, at my comics blog, at EM411, and at my (possibly redundant) music blog. But it seems like the casual nature of Vox could keep me coming back. We’ll see how it goes.
