Vox
While it has been around a while in a sort of cool kids beta, it looks like Vox is finally open to the public. The good: a pretty good user interface, easy theme skinning (a great feature in wordpress, but not everyone is able to install a wordpress blog), great integration with Amazon to add book, music, and DVD collections. I have a Vox account - I wasn’t cool enough to be offered one during the long beta, but I know cool people, and wrangled an invite, friend of a friend-like.
I had heard about Mena Trott bringing her mom out on stage at a demo of Vox, to show what makes Vox different, and as a way of answering the stupid shorthand often heard in development, that references ‘moms’ as being dimwitted slush-ducks, for whom everything has to be dumbed down. Six Apart, a media communications company that also owns Typepad and Livejournal, describes Vox thusly: “Vox makes sharing your life with friends and family easy, entertaining, and safe.” Sounds good.
I stumbled on Vox by accident, back in March, and the first Vox account I saw belonged to Anil, and it made we wonder if this was another example of old skool online journallers picking up some fun new tool as a lark, in much the same way that so many of them, the vanguard of the personal web back in the 90’s have Livejournals now - especially those that would never have had one when Livejournal first debuted in 1999. Vox lets you look at people’s digital neighbourhoods, an important component of digital culture in my book, and when I looked at Anil’s neighbourhood and surfing from there, I saw some pretty surprising names on Vox. People who don’t need a free blog service to publish on the web, people whose names are synonymous with the start of digital culture, social networking via computer mediated communication, and web art installation. Michael Sippy, Brad Fitzpatrick, Derek Powazek, Matthew Haughey, Leslie Harpold, and a huge host of others I am too lazy to link to, but essentially, for those of you who study digital culture, some of the people who are best known for pushing the envelope of personal expression via the early web, all have and use Vox accounts.
I have watched online culture for something like 12 years now. As in, before eggs had their own URL, and before blogs were invented, and certainly before adsense, or anyone had a book deal for their personal site. And every time a new tool came out, I signed up and got an account, played around with it, and then stopped, because….well, because while the interfaces changed, the people I was using them to connect to didn’t. So when PITAS came out, I got a PITA site, linked to all my friends and acquaitances with PITA sites, and then dropped it for the next cool thing, and then the next cool thing, and so on for 12 years, through livejournals and deadjournals and yahoo groups (remember when these were the Next Big Thing?) and all sorts of fora and blogorea. But what I have noticed in those 12 years is the same groups of people, my group, other groups, migrating from Fun Tool to Fun Tool, taking their social contacts with them - so instead of using blogger, vox, flikr, livejournal, to manage different groups of friends, we end up having multiple accounts across multiple tools and platforms whose common thread is that on every platform we use, we are general connecting to the same people.
You can build great tools, but at the end of the day, are they great if their strength is allowing people who are already connected to one another via computer mediated communication to have one more venue in whichto connect to one another digitally?
I love the idea of it - I would love for my offline family and friends to choose a place like Vox to connect, to share news on, and photos, but that assumes that these people would want to learn how to use blogging software, learn why it is secure, learn how privacy works, set up Flikr accounts, etc. But that isn’t going to happen, because if it were? It already would have. It isn’t about the tools not already existing - it is about the fact that not everybody is invested in participating in digital culture, and for those that are, it may be hard to understand why other people are not, but for those that are not - busy people, who already have a lot going on - why should they want to invest the energy in learning how to do something like this? Especially if they already feel like they are connected to their social group via email, face to face interaction, the phone? When you work in media, in digital design, in web development, it is hard to remember that for a lot of people, the only time they sit in front of a computer is at work (where blogging likely violates their work internet TOS) and that not everyone comes home from work and wants to voluntarily spend a few more hours in front of a computer.
It will be interesting to see where Vox goes next. But with so many people on it who already own personal sites and blogs elsewhere, I wonder if it will find its niche.
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