More on Vox

Courtesy of dorwrath, I now have a Standard account on Vox and have been poking around. A lot of that is becuase I hear the bru-ha-ha going on right now with comparing LJ and Vox, and wanted to see this for myself versus third hand. Of course, the result is something that others can then take as thrid hand... *snicker*

Vox is different. It's built upon a different paradigm that LiveJournal has. LiveJournal is all about communal blogging. Yes, you have your own journal, but there are threaded replies easily made from other LJ users, and codes that make is very easy to reference other community members. Vox is more like a traditional, stand-alone blogging service (think Blogger) with a little bit of community thrown in, and with a lot of the Web 2.0 sensabilities. LJ (optionally) sends you emails whenever you get a reply to a post. Vox, not so much. (EDIT: Yes they do. Ignore that. Contiuning...) Whereas LiveJournal is still held to using HTML, Vox uses AJAX to make tasks simple for novices. On LiveJournal, people are concerned about doing cut tags for pictures, less someone be on dial up. Vox is all about a broadband connection, and there are no stinkin' cut tags!

The reason I like LiveJournal is, frankly, you guys. A blog that has no interaction is, frankly, boring to me. I would never keep it updated. But I am vested with LiveJournal and the community that is here. After all, it had been a long time since I kept up with people like lambertman, jiggery_pokery, and jelly_doughnut. Now, these people are in my life again, and I've met many new friends. I just don't see that going away, and I don't see that happening on Vox in it's current state. Mind you, I also don't see what the big deal is about MySpace, so who am I to talk? =)

That being said, there are some Vox features that would be REALLY COOL to see implemented in LiveJournal. Seems like everything has a feed -- the neighborhood, posts by specifc tag, neighborhood by tags... you name it, and it seems to have a feed. And as much as I still do some things "old school" like using <b> HTML tags, some of the newer sensabilities of "click, modify, set" are fairly cool and intuative.

*shrug* Vox still has a ways to go until they are production ready. I mentioned in my last posting about the mobposting security issue, which is major. They don't have a way to effectively post apart from sending an email (unsecured) or visiting their web site. They don't integrate picutres outside their service, so you can't easily put LiveJournal's ScrapBook pictures in a Vox post, or hotlinked pictures from anywhere else on the net. Well, I take that back. You can, interestingly enough, put Flickr and Photobucket pictures in a Vox posting.