The Typepad folks, yes the same ones that also provide Movable Type and Live Journal are now offering a free service called Vox. There is also another entry page with a different presentation:
Vox is a free blogging service that lets you share stories, photos, and videos about your life — in privacy with friends and family, or openly with the world. It’s easy, fun, and works well with the other web things you do.
Create your own blog:1 Choose from over 100 designs — from landscapes to pets to cycling.
2 Write about what interests you. Add mobile phone pics, images from your computer, books from Amazon, video from YouTube and iFilm, photos from Flickr and PhotoBucket, and more.
3 Post photos of your favorite things — they’re automatically collected for you.
4 See what your friends and family are up to.
5Control who can see your content — friends, family, or the world.
Hmmm, two thoughts. First, Blogger seems to have a pretty big lead in this space but some good competition should advance the state of the art. Second, how much will this service cannibalize six apart’s for fee services?
Via Alex Tabarrak.
To my mind, Vox is kind of like a MySpace version of Typepad. I declined an invitation to try it some months back. Last week, Six Apart invited me. I signed up, thinking I might use it with my kids.
What’s interesting to me is that now, Six Apart is touting Typepad as the blogging tool for professional blogs, and Vox as the tool for personal blogs.
Yeah, whatever.
I’ve used TypePad since I began blogging, and I love it. I’ve also checked out Vox, and it seems ideal for ‘personal’ blogging — lots of privacy controls, and very easy to use.
I like it much better than LiveJournal — but that’s just me. It seems a bit simpler and cleaner to me. Vox is where I send my friends who are intimidated by tech, but would like to have a blog-like space.
Also, it’s well integrated into flickr and some other services, which makes everything even easier.