Vox Redux

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.