Huw’s blog

It's really difficult to decide whether or not I like Vox. On the plus side it has lots of good community features - a social network within the context of blogging - which I think will appeal to a whole new demographic from MySpace, bebo etc. It also has some nice features for inserting photos, audio and video which are easier to use than inserting HTML.

On the negative, however, it won't let you insert HTML. This means that, for example, you can't put third party widgets in a post. As far as I can tell the API is also closed which is really irritating.

BLOG written in keys

This isn't my first blog post, by any stretch of the imagination! No, I have been blogging from January this year.

However, this is the first post I have ever done on Vox. I don't think I'm really in the target market for Vox, as I am tech savvy and I have no inherent desire to share my thoughts on my own life with anyone through a blog. There are, however, many people who do, as we can see through the remarkable success of social networking sites such as Bebo and Myspace. The main reason, then, that I am using Vox is that I intend to review it for my tech blog, Gizbuzz.

Vox differs from these in that it is a blogging platform with social networking features, rather than a social network with blogging features. The difference is that instead of a profile page, Vox users have a blog page, with their 'neighbours' listed in the sidebar, as a secondary feature. The same goes for the user Profile. Vox also only allows comments on posts (like a blog) rather than on the whole blog (like a social network).

I have found a bug with Vox. I tried to upload some audio, but it seems to have completely failed, with a firefox message box appearing saying that the script has stopped responding. Inserting a youtube video also failed, but I suspect that's the fault of the Youtube API, given the error message. I would also like to be able to insert my own HTML, which I cannot see an easy way to do. It's a shame, because I was going to describe it as a faultless service!