Greetings Voxers,

We've received a press request searching for the following:

I need to interview a spokesperson, very briefly, about parents' use of blogs to keep in touch with almost-grown children.  I'm especially interested in young adults who are travelling or living abroad and writing a blog.  

If you fit this description or know someone who does, please comment below with a link and if the writer is interested we'll contact you via private message.

Thanks!
- Krissy

Did you catch Vox in last Sunday's New York Times?

Anne Eisenberg wrote a piece entitled "So, Who Says That a Blog Has to Blare?" about privacy in blogging, and Vox was the focus of the story.  Read the full article here.

Voxers BT and Bryn Greenwood were interviewed for the article.  BT was quoted as saying:

“The privacy function is very important,” he said. “I don’t want anyone but my friends and family to see pictures of my kids on the Web.”  Mr. Tenderich sends pictures to his blog directly from his cellphone, a practice called moblogging. And he recently started experimenting with video additions. “This weekend I posted my first video clip,” he said. “When I came into work on Monday, there was an e-mail from my dad in Germany, who had viewed and liked it.”

Thanks to Anne, BT and Bryn for helping spread the word about Vox!

We also saw some kind words about Vox over on Ask MetaFilter earlier this week.   MetaFilter user stuehler posited the question:

"My wife and I are expecting our first child soon, and I've been looking for a site that would allow us to post photographs, videoclips, maybe a journal/blog, etc., and then allow family members/friends to log-in and view them. Has anyone used such a site they'd recommend strongly?"

Several people wrote in recommending Vox.  Thanks everyone!

We love to hear success stories about Voxers using their friends and family filters to share their precious content with the people they love.   Read All About Privacy for more information on using privacy filters on Vox.

-- Krissy

Vox has become such a huge part of Six Apart that it's hard to believe it wasn't around this time last year!  Team Vox wanted to take a moment to reflect on 2006.

Vox has been in development for more than two years, but its debut beyond the confines of Six Apart HQ came this past June.  Code-named Comet, an early version of the service launched as an invitation-only beta with all Six Apart employees getting just a few invitations each to invite their friends and family.  Team Vox established an energetic development schedule, releasing new features, changes and tweaks a few times a month and paying close attention to user feedback. 

Development and testing continued over the summer, and invitations were slowly doled out by the handful.  Mena and a few other team members traveled to key cities across the U.S. to hold preview parties and to develop the community beyond the Bay Area.  The traveling team also gave a ton of interviews and product demos which resulted in stellar press both pre- and post-launch.  Vox was written up in The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Newsweek, Financial Times and in many more publications.  

We also learned early on that Vox’s clean, simple and colorful design had attracted some very creative users.  Inspired by enthusiastic entries to a Vox coloring contest, we announced the Vox Banner Contest where the Design Team would choose five user-submitted banners to turn into Vox themes. After reviewing over 600 entries from the community, the team decided to choose 50 winners and have been releasing their themes throughout the fall.

Vox opened to the public on the evening of October 25, 2006, and Six Apart celebrated with a fun launch party on October 26th at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco.  Vox users had something to celebrate when the Vox World Tour Promotion was announced that same day.  By signing up for a Vox account and posting about their enjoyable experiences on Vox, users are automatically registered to win an all expenses paid trip to see and experience the three cities where it was born - San Francisco, Paris, and Tokyo.  (There's still time to enter!)

For a service that launched less than two months ago, Vox already has an active community with a vibrant, inviting personality.  Vox users, or Voxers as we call them, have taken the concept of friends and neighbors very seriously, forming strong bonds with the other Voxers in their Neighborhoods.  Voxers have begun to put together meetups of their own, gathering in San Diego, Boston, Long Beach and London, with more planned for next year.

It has been an exciting and rewarding year getting Vox off the ground and we can't wait to see what 2007 brings!

In the meantime, please take a moment to enjoy the Six Apart holiday movie.

- Team Vox

Mena was recently interviewed for the Times Online in an article entitled "Blogosphere 2.0: civility strikes back".  You can read the article here. 

In the article, Mena talks about Vox and civility in blogging:

"Trott has an interesting golden rule that she would like to see bloggers adopt. "If you aren’t going to say something directly to someone’s face, than don’t use online as an opportunity to say it," she says. "It is this sense of bravery that people get when they are anonymous that gives the blogosphere a bad reputation."

Vox was built with a lot of these issues in mind, in regards to the privacy filters, knowing your neighbors, and the fact there is a [this is good] but not a [this is bad].  The topic of online etiquette is on the minds of a lot of people, with this recent article in the New York Times as another example.

How do you feel about civility (or the lack thereof) in blogging?  Any positive or negative experiences to share?

--Krissy

"Do you wonder what blogs are and how they affect you?  What are the benefits?  And what should you know before reading one?"

Yesterday Mena addressed these questions for the masses when she appeared on a live local news program here in San Francisco called "The View from the Bay".

Tune in to watch the short segment where ABC7 news hosts interviewed Mena and blogger and TypePad user M.J. Call. 

Vox has gotten some love from the press lately, and we wanted to share a few links.

• Watch a video of Mena being interviewed for MarketWatch.

• Read an interview with Mena in The Economist.
  

• Read a review of Vox in the Wall Street Journal.  The screenshot they use is of Bliss, one of the pups in the Six Apart family.    

• There's also a writeup of Vox in the MIT Tech Review, which gives shout outs to posts by Voxers Georgie-boy and artgeek.     

Have you seen any other Voxers in the news?  Share your links in the comments!

-- Krissy

Vox got some love in the latest issue of Time Out Chicago.  In their "Time In" section, Margaret Lyons interviews Mena and reports on the positive nature of Vox:

Vox’s claim to fame is going to be that it’s the happiest, cheeriest place in the blogosphere. And Trott’s happy about it. “Being online can be fun. We want to capture that. This is supposed to be pleasurable. If you want to write posts that never get troll comments, that are just for your friends, that’s completely acceptable,” she says.

The full article is also available for you to read online.  Let us know what you think in the comments!

- Krissy