After reading about it in Newsweek this week, I decided to go explore Vox,the newest blogging service from Six Apart. Six Apart also owns the blogging services Moveable Type, Type Pad, and Live Journal.

What's unique and smart about this particular service is something that's always in the back of my mind when blogging: privacy. Some of my blog cohorts, all of whom are male, don't think twice about posting their photo, real name, where they live, and so on, and that's cool. As a woman, I feel I have to be concerned with it. Since I started blogging 9 months ago, I've made some great friends - some of whom I've never even met face to face. I still have a healthy wariness of giving out too much information lest some nut decide to try and meet me. Also, it is well-documented that many people in corporate America played "you bet your job" with short-sighted comments they made on their blogs, and were later fired for them.

Enter Vox. What Vox does is allow you to control visibility to your blog at the 'element' level. Each post, photo, video,etc. can be accessed only by the people you specify in your 'neighborhood' or group of people who are allowed to access your blog. It must work because Six Apart says on its blog that already Vox has over 85,000 members. What is also cool about it is out of the gate it works with other popular Web 2.0 content managers such as YouTube, Flickr, Amazon,etc. Theoretically this means you don't have to necessarily have multiple blogs or identities on the web anymore. Vox's personality seems to be funky, creative, cutting edge, and highly community-oriented.

I then tried to get a sense of what the 'crowd' was like at Vox by browsing member profiles and popular tags. At present my take is it is a very creative, cutting edge community, somewhat on the twenty-something side. Some of the blogs and tags would lead you to think Vox is the lovechild of MySpace and Blogger; on my visit , among the most popular tags were 'best friend' 'QotD' (quote of the day) , 'first kiss', and 'ghost story'.

I would also like to see how well Vox's tagging system spiders with other popular services such as Technorati and delicious, and if Blogrolling and other popular 'plug in' tools play well with Vox. Perhaps they will lead the revolt brewing in the blogosphere against tag service overload.

Give Vox a look, and let me know what you think.

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