Vox
Not to be confused with: The almighty Vox Dramatica prize, or Vox Media
Vox was a defunct service created by Six Apart as part of its five-year plan to control the blogging universe. It was marketed as a LiveJournal for grown-ups. Instead of pulling a Facebook and taking out LiveJournal. Six Apart didn't think this one through, since they also owned LiveJournal as well, so for all purposes this was a planned an hero. After selling off LiveJournal to Russians and launching both Vox and obtaining a Twitter-copy called Pownce, the company sank faster than the Titanic. The first to go was Pownce, then Vox. Now Six Apart is planning its next terrible blogging service, Type Pad, a knockoff of Tumblr.
Contrary to popular belief, Vox was the same thing as LiveJournal. The only difference was that Vox looked like somebody took a big fat Web 2.0 shit all over it. Type Pad is expected to be LiveJournal with the Vox Web 2.0 shit all over it plus a huge dose of unfiltered hipster.
Thankfully, it closed on September 30th.
— 5tokd7k, a person who actually gave a shit about Vox.com | ||
Vox drama
Months before its scheduled public launch in the fall of 2006, Vox already stirred up drama. Many users were upset over Six Apart's description of LiveJournal. In the "About Vox" page, Six Apart originally wrote:
LiveJournal has grown to be an amazing community of fiercely independent bloggers, primarily teenagers and twenty-somethings.
While this was completely factual, many users who were past that age group felt insulted and slightly umamused(and rightly so: how do they expect to be treated? They were using a site geared towards fucking teenagers!) Six Apart was forced to change the wording, which now reads:
LiveJournal has grown to be an amazing community of fiercely independent bloggers. Over the past seven years, that community has developed in both its scope and its need for powerful customization.
Vox invite codes
Vox initially needed 'invite codes' though no one uses it. It was a failed attempt to make the site "exclusive" to those who used it, turning much of the user base into snobby LiveJournal washouts.
Tag clouds
Vox, much like every other website to come into existence in recent years, featured the highly useless, and therefore trendy feature of tags. If you for some reason do not use tags, you srsly need to wake up, smell the coffee, and welcome yourself to the 21st century, girlfriend.
These were arranged in traditional "popular tags" clouds, on various pages throughout the site. The link text to these tags grew larger the more people are using that tag, which was really just asking for it.
Handicap Accessibility
Vox was officially the first blog user interface designed for blind people. Most of the fonts are at least as big as the buttons on phones for blind, fat, or old people. There were lots of friendly colored boxes with arrows showing you where to type. Sometimes the site even tells you what to write:
—Vox | ||
The Future
Currently the staff at Six Apart is working on TypePad, which is just a hipster's version of Vox. Note: There is already a hipster blogging site out there called Tumblr, apparently Six Apart never got the memo, or they are seriously attempting to make money of copypasta. However most users of Vox aren't too keen on going over to TypePad...
—Brew Gresika: a former Vox.com user | ||
—Denise Wong: Confirmed Weeb | ||
—Deborah Lehman: needs to go outside. | ||
See Also
External Links
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Vox is part of a series on Visit the Sites Portal for complete coverage. |