QotD: They’re Grrreat!

A while ago while flailing about looking for a multi-contributor hosted blogging product I signed up to be notified of a new product the folks at SixApart were working on.  At that point I thought it would allow me to setup multiple individual blogs and provide the ability to have all the sub-blog posts consolidate into a single overarching master-blog.

Then just last week I received an invite to setup a Vox account. Vox is SixApart‘s a new turnkey "blogging and sharing" tool. "Woo Hoo!" I thought to myself, "let’s see what this puppy can do."

I setup an account – unsweetened.vox.com, and immediately found a couple of my bleeding-edge friends/stalkees already posting there – Kate and Photojunkie.

My excitement was peeked by Photojunkie’s team podcast site – Slapdash.
However, after asking Rannie for some details, he told me that he is
posting for all the team members. So not the tool I’d been hoping for.
At least not yet.

At this point, Vox is really a tool for an individual blogger – with
a blend of features from Typepad and LiveJournal. I’m liking it so far
for community-building and tracking your friends, but can see
limitations for bigger business blogging purposes.

The blog templates are limited, but new ones seem to be available
weekly. Posting is quick and easy, and as with Typepad, fairly
customizable.

And Vox is already integrated with many of the standards: Amazon, Flickr, YouTube, iStockPhoto, Photobucket.

You can even have a short summary of your Vox posts placed on your
Typepad blog which will send your blog readers to your Vox account to
read the full post. Initially I misunderstood this feature (it does
happen occasionally) and thought that Vox would pull in a summary of
any of posts made to the Typepad blogs you configured. Thus giving me
the master-blog capability I wanted. That would ROCK if you are a
multi-blogger who wants the to consolidate the meat of your content in
a single location. But sadly, no.

Heads-up though, you can only config one Typepad blog for this
auto-post-to-Typepad feature. Not so good to have a personal post
summarized on the CheapEats Ottawa blog – whoops!!!

Vox allows quick and easy addition of photos from Flickr, iStockPhoto, Photobucket;
tagging of photos and posts; addition of books, audio and videos.
Though I’m a little surprised you have to explicitly select the photos
from your Flickr photostream that you want displayed… rather than
showing the full public version stream. (or at least having that as an
option.)

But one of the best things about Vox is the QotD – Question of the Day.
It’s kind of like a daily meme built right into the system. Each day a
questions is posted and with the single click of a button you can
respond and have the response posted on your Vox blog. Oh, and you
can’t auto-cross-post your QotD responses to your Typepad blog.

If you are interested in check it out, it looks like Vox is
invite-only. But I have an extra invite I could pass along if someone
is interested. Just drop me a note.

Today’s QotD was "What or who is your favorite product mascot? Why?"  Can you guess what my answer was?

Tags: vox, qotd, tools, blogs, six apart, typepad, flickr, istockphoto, photobucket

p.t. funny that they don’t have a downloadable logo I can use in this post to promote them.