3 posts tagged “wishlist”

The Clash performing "London Calling" and "Train in Vain" on Fridays in April of 1980.

And from the same show, "Guns of Brixton" and "Clampdown".

(Also, Team Vox, it would be nice to have the option to just embed a specific URL for YouTube videos instead of searching by tag. These particular videos are only tagged "clash" on their system and don't come up in the Vox search.)

I just added a friend of a friend to my neighborhood because she has an incredibly cute dog (hi, Lia and Jarvis!), but she has no idea who I am. It would be great if I could include a note in the e-mail that the person gets so I could tell her I'm not just a stalker. I'm a dog stalker.

Now that I've spent a few hours with Vox, I wanted to get some thoughts down. Jeff and Andre have already touched on a couple of things that I'm thinking about, but I'm thinking slightly differently about them.

First, I'm really anxious to get some of my non-blogging friends and family hooked up with this. I set up a family blog site back on MT v.1 and it worked for a while, but I think various barriers to entry (learning the interface, learning what to post and what not to post, grokking blogging in the first place, and privacy issues) kept my parents, siblings, and siblings-in-law from really getting into it. There's a lot in Vox that already brings value to what my family was looking for and accomplishes the stuff that I was having a hard time implementing in MT.

Things I would love to see, some of which might be more advanced than the casual Vox blogger would use, but which would make Vox useful in ways that all the other social networking and blogging services are not:

• Self-defined circles of friends
  Andre mentioned concentric circles of friends, but I'm thinking more like a Venn diagram. I create an abritrarily-named group and can add any of my contacts to that group.
• Create starter accounts for friends
  Something that Jeff mentioned that I think would be tremendously useful. I want my mom to have an account so she can read my "family" posts. Rather than sending her an invitation to create an account, I set up an account with her e-mail address and a password and she gets an e-mail from me, with a message like "Hey, Mom -- I wrote something you might like to read. Click here and sign in with your e-mail address and this password. If you want to start your own blog, you can do that, too."
• Vox-to-Vox trackbacks
  I'm not sure how I would explain this to beginning bloggers, but this post is a perfect example. I've got more than a comment's worth to say, but I'd like it if people who see Andre's and Jeff's posts could see this one, too. If I could trackback from this post to theirs, the conversation could spread outside our shared neighborhood to neighbors we don't have in common. Maybe the language could be something like "Link this post to one of your neighbors' posts" or something. I know trackback in general hasn't been able to gain a lot of ground, but I think in a contained blogging community like this one, it stands a chance of succeeding in some form.
• More design options
  I sure hope the work going on for the Style Contest will apply here. I assume you wouldn't have done all that work rationalizing the templates across the other three products and left out CometVomix Vox. More templates, or a way to use Style Catcher, or even better, a way to link to an external stylesheet.
• Cross-network friending
  I have several friends on MySpace and LiveJournal who aren't going to move. They're just invested enough in blogging and their sites to keep them going, but not invested enough to move to a new network. I suppose I could create a collection for each of the other networks and put my friends links in there, but it would be interesting to see what could happen with something more formalized.
  

I must say, it's growing on my very quickly; more quickly than I would have thought.  I like the collections stuff and I like the privacy controls. I like it better than TypePad and a LOT better than LiveJournal and would love to get a Movable Type install this easy to use.

Good work, Team Vox! I look forward to seeing how it grows!