Edited 2006-07-24: I have no more invites. The ones I had are all gone. Any “refills” I get in the future I plan to send out to people I already know, either in real life, or from online.

Edited 2006-07-19: Sorry, I wasn’t very clear about something. Anyone can look at my Vox blog (or anyone else’s Vox blog) and see the posts that I have set to “viewable by the world,” which is most of them at this point. You need an account if you want to be “friends” or “family” with someone else on Vox (at the other person’s discretion) and/or if you want to try using Vox for your own blog. My Vox blog is at http://hatchibombotar.vox.com/. Right now, the lead post is a YouTube video of an unmanned rocket blowing up. And I use bad words sometimes! It’s highbrow stuff over there.

Dear readers, I have been away from See Also for a time because I have been cheating on it with another blog on Vox.

Vox is a new blogging platform from Six Apart, the company that does Movable Type, Type Pad and LiveJournal. It is supposed to be something like LiveJournal for “grown-ups,” in that it enables you to create a blog “neighborhood” of the people whose Vox sites you wish to follow. You can also designate some of your neighbors as “friends” or “family” (as you can with Flickr).

You can also control who gets to see what. So for each blog post, you can choose whether everyone can see it, or only friends, family, or both.

Vox makes it easy to upload multimedia, or embed media from other sites like Flickr or YouTube. There is also a way to display books–i.e., images of book covers from Amazon–but there is little else you can do with them. I mentioned to Tim Spalding at Library Thing that I could envision an interesting tie-in from Library Thing to Vox; we’ll see if anything happens there.

As with your posts, you can designate your photos, videos, audio, etc. as viewable only by friends or family, if you so desire.

Exploring Vox can be a little odd. You’ll find many well-known web personalities like Merlin Mann, Anil Dash, Matt Haughey, and others. But (a) it doesn’t seem likely that any of them will do something as interesting on Vox as they have been doing on the projects that made them so well-known, and (b) if you aren’t friends with these folks, your are likely locked out of many of their Vox posts.

For me, Vox is fun. It is a little liberating to have a “personal” blog for posting cat pictures, photos of my family, my thoughts on random non-library stuff, and the like. It is nice to connect a bit more with my online imaginary friends. It is generally easy to use, though I sometimes have a hard time remembering where I saw certain links or features. And there seems to be no way to write regular HTML in the posts, which can be annoying when there is a hard-to-figure display quirk. My most serious reservation is the amount of “lock-in” that Vox entails. The terms of service make it clear that you own your content, not Vox. But at the moment, as far as I can tell, there is no way to export your posts, photos, etc. I know that leaving Vox would mean leaving behind the social features, but I’d still like the ability to export my posts into a text file.

At this point, Vox is by invitation only. I have two invites now, so if you want to check it out, email me.

Tags: blogging, vox