Vox neighborhood

If MySpace is the place to be seen as the hottest restaurant/bar in the country, Vox is the place where you can feel comfortable and safe. It's a feeling you might have at your favorite neighborhood bar, like Cheers (the bar in that long-running situation comedy).  Vox is Six Apart's answer to capturing the many non-bloggers out there who have been introduced to blogging via social networks, like MySpace. Vox is Six Apart's social network/blog for Luddites.  You can choose who you want to be in your neighborhood or family. "It clearly has a lot of social-networking aspects," said Six Apart's Andrew Anker, who was showing me around his virtual network yesterday. I should mention that Vox is not yet open to the public. Even though Six Apart has been working on this project for over a year, it'll be officially launched in September, so Anker predicts. 

After having played around with Vox for not even two hours, I can honestly say, it's one of the easiest blog tools out there - which will work in Vox's favor, I'm sure. That's one of the three reasons I like it. 1) Ease of use 2) One-click options 3) Emphasis on family/friend closed environment (are we tired of being public?).

1) When you compose a post, to the left of the post box, you have options to post photos, videos (from YouTube), and books (from Amazon). Most people like to embed graphics and videos, so having those options right there is easy. 2) Embedding is a one-step procees. I easily embedded a video of my nephew Bubba snowboarding into a post and wrote around it. I also like the fact that you can easily edit right from the front page. No longer do bloggers have to go through a backdoor, like I do when I'm blogging on TypePad. 3) I think my mom might want to start blogging with this tool as long as she knows no one else but me (and other family members) can see it. I know blogs have been around for a while, like Blogger (kind of easy), but this one might just be the right speed for someone like my mom.

As Anker puts it: She won't get performance anxiety. And, I'll add, she'll feel safe and connected. Maybe the pendulum will swing, and the desire to be in a big network like MySpace will decline, and the desire to be in a place where everyone knows our name feels just right.