Blogs have a place in many of our everyday lives, even if we aren’t bloggers ourselves. The word “blog,” short for “Web log,” is used to describe personal Web sites that are frequently updated with entries for sharing with others. They can range from your son’s personal blog about baseball statistics to a well-read and more-polished political blog that gets tens of thousands of hits each day.
A big problem with blogs is privacy. While some people – especially MySpace fans – don’t mind posting personal news, photos and videos for anyone to read, many of us hesitate to put details about our personal lives online.
This week, I tested a new, free blogging service called Vox (www.vox.com), from Six Apart Ltd., a blogging software company. One of Vox’s best attributes is its ability to label each individual post, or entry, with a different privacy filter, so that instead of setting your blog to be entirely private or entirely public, you can pick and choose what you want to share.
Vox also excels at making it easy to add photos, audio, videos and book links to your blog without any prior expertise. Vox is supported by ads that aren’t intrusive or distracting.
Making a blog and updating it was quick and simple and the results were attractive. But Vox has a few downsides. Its idea of making each blog post visible to different groups is useful. But everyone who views your privacy-protected entries must also be registered with Vox, a quick process, but one that will discourage potential users.
Also puzzling are Vox’s categories for labeling those who view your blog. Everyone must be labeled as friends, family or neighbors, but the filters that determine who can view your posts don’t include neighbors.
You start by signing up for Vox – a process that involves entering your e-mail address, creating a password and URL, and entering personal information. A design section walked us through choosing a layout and theme from numerous choices.
If you see another person’s Vox blog and would like to bookmark it so that his or her latest entries are constantly updated on a special page just for you, you can add that blogger to your neighborhood. Friends and family are automatically part of your neighborhood, but when choosing who can see your content, neighborhood isn’t an option. Vox plans to make the neighborhood concept more understandable in an updated version due out soon.
As I became comfortable using Vox and its privacy options, I started posting lots of things: vacation photos, a country music audio file to play along with a post about two-stepping and even Amazon links to favorite books. And unless your post or profile is public, nothing can be retrieved using the Vox search feature.
The idea that no one else would randomly browse across the content was a comfort. But that poses another problem: Not everyone will want to register with Vox just to see your protected content. Vox hopes to offer a way to register others so that your grandmother will be able to see your family photos online just by entering a username and password.
Back on the home page of Vox, a section called VoxWatch lets you quickly see any recent activity from neighbors or yourself.
A helpful “organize” section divvies all of your content up into its proper section: photos, books, audio, videos, posts and comments. This section allows you to quickly find a comment that you want to reread – a boon as you add more and more content. This section also displays the names of those in your neighborhood, as well as friends and family.
Vox does a nice job of jazzing up the world of blogging. Its designs are attractive, but it really shines when loading media onto your posts, making your blog richer in content and more sophisticated in looks. Updates will continue to be released, improving Vox’s weaknesses, the most important of which is clarifying its group labels. Vox also plans to offer to import your content from other blogging sites, encouraging experienced users to bring their last blog along with them instead of leaving it with the old service.
Walter Mossberg writes for the Wall Street Journal.
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