Six Apart has done a very good thing. They’ve made me enjoy blogging again.
If you poke your nose over the edge of their cauldron, you’ll see a blogging service like no other simmering in private beta. A closer look reveals that you can post articles, photos, video, audio. I know, you can do that now with Flickr and YouTube.
Integrate. Fear not. Close integration with Flickr, YouTube and other community based media sites let you simply post content from your other collections right from the compose screen. Ladies and gentlemen, Vox.
Oh, and Six Apart has done a very bad thing. They’ve made me hate my Movable Type user interface.
Compose. Speaking of the compose screen. It really is amazingly easy to use. I have a MySpace, Xanga and Yahoo blog, and none even comes close to the simplicity, power and organization of Vox. I nearly fell out of my chair when I copied and pasted from my personal blog into the Vox compose screen and it kept all of my HTML intact, including pictures. (This doesn’t work on a Mac because of javascript/form limitations.) And none of the services out there integrate the asset listing like Vox does. You literally get a list of comments, a list of posts, a list of photos, a list of videos, all with options to change everything.
Podcast? Unlike most other blogging services, Vox flaunts it’s RSS feed. Wait a minute. You can post video and audio too. RSS + video/audio = podcasting. Excellent.
Oh yes, one other thing.
Tags. If you used Flickr or del.icio.us, you know what i’m talking about. ‘Me tags’ make navigating your site much more granular, not to mention how easy they’ve made it to add and remove them. Yes, they have tag autocomplete!
SO. You can’t sign up for it. However, if you’re sick of your blogging platform and want something better, I have 1 standard invite left (unlimited starter invites for anyone who wants a profile, a neighborhood and the ability to post comments). If anyone’s interested, let me know. I may get more invites, so it’ll be on a first come, first serve basis.
In the meantime, check out my Vox of Plasticmind.
