Moving stuff out
30/08/2008
I’d really rather be in Japan
Nah, just moving my knitting-related photos and frustrations over to another blog and another Flickr account.
Was impressed with Vox years ago when Netjackal told me about it, and am still impressed with them now. It’s almost as if they know what a blog user wants (and needs).
How? Maybe they spend more time implementing what someone needs than by pandering to politics and beauracracy. Maybe. Or maybe they’re just lucky. I wish Y! bought them instead of wasting that much time on crap like 360° and Mash – which they’re now shutting down. Poor Mash. It didn’t even make it past beta. It’s middle name would’ve been “Ill-Conceived”. Mash Ill-Conceived Yahoo! (or the other way around, like Oriental names). Like a sad child whose parents struggled with the status of their relationship, and had another baby partly to “make their relationship stronger”, and partly to replace or sustain their other child 360°. His short, sad life ended before it really began.
Yahoo! Communities should just adopt. Vox is a bright, good kid, who’s growing up real fast. They might have to marry it instead.
Why do I like Vox?
1. Plenty of themes to choose from. Like P-L-E-N-T-Y. The theme I chose for my knitting blog is part personlised. All I did was add that image up top. Easy, yet personal.
The trouble with a load of blog products, free or otherwise, like Blogger and the (now defunct) Y! 360°, Livejournal, Moveable Type, Typepad, etc was that they took too much time and effort to look presentable. Either there was no/little choice – like Blogger/Y! 360°, or it took too much trouble messing with the damn CSSes – like with MT. MT was a real pain, because I’d have to find templates for my version of MT and all, and I’d have to log into the MT admin, test it and stuff. That explains why I’m not changing the look of this blog. It also explains why the commenting is screwy, and I lost the ones from the previous domain. Ah well.
2. Easy to use. Relatively. A quick set up, it still is easy to find my way around set-up and publishing, stuff like that.
3. They make it easy to find content to publish. A lot of the time, the main problem with blogs is that the person writes a few entries, then decides there’s nothing to talk about and stops. Vox tries to help them along by making it easy to add a host of content like photos, audio clips, videos, books and all. They also get content from third parties, so you’re not limited by what you have on hand. You can also get plugged into your own Flickr/Photobucket account easily. So there’s always something to talk about.
4. They find friends for you. Another obstacle for bloggers is that not all of them are all that famous and because they’re mostly writing personal stuff, they don’t get a lot of readership. I mean, who’d write if no one’s reading? Vox scours your addressbook to look up your friends (by their email address, silly) so you can add them in your “neighbourhood”. It’ll also send a notice to the folks who aren’t on Vox to tell them where your blog is. So it’s kinda like Facebook in that way. Gives you an overview of your friends’ updates, and tells the lame ones who aren’t on to check you out, mesmerise those lame-ohs and try to make them cool.
This satisfies the Love/Belonging needs in Maslow’s Hierachy. Very clever, these social new-fangled internet 2.0 babies.
5. They help you belong. So if you are going to write about something specific, for example knitting, where you can’t pay your friends and family to read that stuff, you can find groups to share those interests. What’s on those groups? Basically, collective posts. It’s a digest. People write on their blogs, and choose to post to those groups, quite like Flickr photo groups, it’s like a large collective blog.
This satisfies the Love/Belonging, Esteem and perhaps even Self Actualisation needs in Maslow’s Hierachy (if your self actualisation needs are that complex).
The one BIG thing they don’t solve, is your baggage. Most blog publishers are, by now, not virgins anymore. This wouldn’t be their first blog, and unless they’re willing to make a clean break, there does not seem to be an easy way to import older posts onto Vox. Yeah, there are probably issues associated in doing so, it will require a lot more diskspace, they’d have to write import tools for a host of different blogs, etc. But I’d be the first to ditch my MT blog for this – if I will be able to import the old entries. It’d be perfectly ok even if I lost the comments. That saves me and my favourite service provider some maintenance time.
I don’t know if I’d pay for it. Maybe. After all, I now pay for a Flickr Pro account! Yeah, I’d pay for it if the price is right ~ $50 a year. That should cover the import of my old entries, sort of hosting for the year, and if I pay for it I definitely want my own domain. Yeah.
Why do I feel like I just wrote the bulk of someone’s PRD.
