vox populi, vox neuro

What's your cell phone's ringtone? What made you pick it?

Good Old Nokia

Something that really winds me up is mobile ringtones.  Aside from some dalliances with R2-D2 noises when I received text messages, and Basement Jaxx's Good Luck when taking calls, I've stuck to a simple "ring ring" ringtone wherever possible.  The only problem is that Nokia have made that harder and harder as time has gone on.  My 5100 had a fantastic "ring ring" tone which I've yet to find duplicated on later phones, which is a shame.

My phone should sound like a phone when it's ringing; sorry if that's old fashioned, but if I don't see the point in music announcing a call.  We've been hard-wired to respond to "brrr brrr" as the notification for an incoming call, just like people knocking at your door or ringing a door bell means you need to go see who's there.  Maybe I'm just too old school for my own good, and one day "ring ring" will be an anachronism I need to work out of my system in the same way I can't write text messages in txt spk!

I had intended to keep dumping stuff on Vox over the LugRadio Live weekend, but combinations of ninja duties, catching up with people and copious drinking left me completely incapable of configuring my Nokia N70 to email stuff to Vox.  Oops.

LugRadio Live 2006, Wolverhampton, July 22-23

It's LugRadio Live time again!  Some ScotLUG types and myself are embarking on a road trip tomorrow from Glasgow to Wolverhampton to join in the fun, meet old friends, make new ones, and hopefully ask Mark Shuttleworth some strange questions (again).

I'm going to try and blog more about the event here on Vox to try out the various interfaces it has, especially the mobile interface, which looks intriguing.

Chin!

So, my vox invite appeared out of the blue today, thought I'd give the system a quick whirl.  It's immediately very different from Movable Type and Live Journal, attempting to merge the community features of flickr and myspace into a lighter version of TypePad, which was always just an advanced Movable Type hosting system anyway.

The posting interface is clean, if a bit buggy, and it's from this interface that I can see the target audience: not bloggers already used to posting in HTML, posting in an advanced form with various settings, and not bloggers wishing the various meta settings such as those representing current moods, music, avatars.

This is Blogging for the Rest of You.  Not Us, You.

And I don't mean that in an elitist way, I mean it in an inclusive manner.  Finally, there's a simple, clean blogging interface which attempts to incorporate recent community building tools in a way people can understand without wanting or needing to care about the intricacies old-school bloggers associate with blogging.  Subject, quick links to external content I might reference, toolbar, content, privacy, tags, post.  Click, type, click, done.

My parents, were they to blog, would undoubtedly be more at home with this than MT, Wordpress or even one of the more ungainly hosted systems like AOL People Connection.

Vox is interesting.  Let's keep watch.