I’ve been using Vox for a couple of weeks to test out the features and get a feel for how user-friendly it is.

To get some more intuitive feedback I also invited Dancergirl to start a blog over there and see which she liked better for usability, flexibility, etc. Dancergirl does very well at figuring things out by herself, so I figured she was a great test subject.

One of the complaints Dancergirl has had about Blogger from Day One is that she can’t customize the colors, layout, images, etc. on Blogger by herself without first reading an encyclopedia of information about HTML and CSS, not to mention tiptoeing through the Blogger template code (at least, pre Blogger-beta which we haven’t taken a stab at yet).

Initial Setup

We both had our Vox blogs set up with initial posts on it in about 10 minutes. It was just about as easy as it gets. She may have even done hers a little faster than me, because I was spending more time looking at all my options and also trying to figure out where to focus the blog itself.

It took both of us a little longer to figure out how to upload avatars, but ultimately we succeeded. Editing our profiles was easy enough.

Vox is really flexible when it comes to layout, adding sidebar content and choosing a template within the available presets. There are a lot of options for blog designs and images to choose from, but they are not intended to be tweaked once chosen. On Dancergirl’s Blogger blog, I’ve substituted her beach photo for the stock header image and tweaked the colors. As far as I can see, this would not be possible on Vox, nor do I think it necessarily should be, since that complicates what is intended to be simple and straightforward for non-bloggers. The available templates come in a wide range of color palettes and have some nice variances in designs — from the cutesy template to a darker, bolder style to a nice clean Zen-like template with soothing colors.

We were able to set up our Vox blogs to integrate our Flickr accounts with a couple of mouse clicks and that’s where I stopped on the first go-round. Dancergirl continued to explore and was able to easily add her current reading list via a very nice interface with Amazon.com. I also was inspired to do that tonight after reading Maryam’s most recent book review. Very cool — one click to bring up a dialogue box with an Amazon search, entered search terms and got a list with thumbnails back. One click on the thumbnail and it’s on my list!

Posting

Posting is easy. Write it and publish it. The standard tools for adding links, photos and the like are easy to identify and use.

Adding a photo is easy. You can add one from Flickr, Photobucket, iStockPhoto, or upload one from your computer. Once you’ve got the photo it’s just a matter of telling Vox where to position it and what size it should be.

Dancergirl’s observation: Vox’ “large size” is small. I’ve tried explaining bandwidth, positioning and page weight to her, but she pooh-poohs that, rightly pointing out that people who aren’t blogging geeks don’t care about page weight, positioning and bandwidth. They just want large to mean large or else to have some kind of understanding of why large is really not very large.

I think part of the confusion here comes from Flickr’s sizing definitions of small, medium and large, so it might be worthwhile to tie the Vox sizing to the Flickr sizing, limiting the largest Vox size to the Flickr medium size.

I experimented with adding MP3 files to my Vox blog tonight. It was really easy. Vox supports uploads of most standard portable music formats, including the iTunes AAC format, provided it’s unprotected. I added recordings of Sticks’ concerts with the jazz band last year and also pulled some of Bigdog’s moblog videos from their trip to Denton in July. Just like the photos, it was very easy and seamless. I simply entered Bigdog in the YouTube search box and then clicked the videos I wanted to include on the blog.

I have done all of my posting to Vox from my laptop but the Vox blog does come with a moblog email address so that I can post from my cell phone. It even allows for different email posting addresses so that moblog posts can have different tags or privacy settings.

Of course, adding all of this content means that the sidebars can look a bit cluttered before long. With photos, video, audio, tag clouds, recent comments and neighbors on the the sidebars it starts to be a bit busy for me. When that happens I really just need to take half a second and visit a MySpace blog or two…they’ve got to be the busiest, most disorganized and ugliest blogs on the planet, but hey — they’re working. I really like the ease of adding the most recent photos, video and audio to the sidebars — it’s not easy to do in Wordpress or Blogger, but it’s as simple as a couple of mouse clicks in Vox.

Vox also has a feature called “Collections”. I really like this whole concept and the way it’s executed. The idea is to put together all of the different pieces of content you have related to a specific topic. It’s a more sophisticated version of the Wordpress category idea.

Ironically, Dancergirl figured out how to create and add content to this a lot faster than I did. Adding content to a collection was the only topic I had to go to the Vox help files for (which were easily accessible from the Collections screen and well-explained). I intuitively had the right idea but didn’t actually click on a piece of content so that I could see the “Add to” button. Once I read the help file it took me just a couple of minutes to add to a Jazz and “Drummr” collection. (The Drummr name is because I recently bought that domain for Sticks and am building a website for him with his content and charts on it)

Community

The mechanics of participating in the larger Vox community are very Flickr-like. Adding “Neighbors” (the equivalent of Flickr contacts or MySpace friends) is as simple as clicking the “Add to neighborhood” link available when an avatar is clicked.

Everything posted to Vox can be tagged and that means it’s pretty easy to find others interested in similar topics or content. I’ve been posting pug pics on that blog and I think I’d posted three when another person who likes pugs came along, commented and became one of my neighbors. Neighbors can be classified as friends, family, or simply neighbors. Friend or family classifications allow for varying privacy levels to be set on email addresses, posts, and other blog content.

As time goes on I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about the community aspects. I haven’t really had the time to fully explore it and figured this initial post would be more about the mechanics of using a Vox blog.

Tagging: A whine

I really wish that all of the social networking sites would settle on a standard for tag entry. On Technorati, tags are commas-separated. Same for Vox. For Flickr, del.icio.us and several other sites, tags are space-separated. This drives me NUTS. I will inevitably tag the wrong way no matter what the heck I’m tagging. Please, let’s settle on whether tags should be separated by commas or spaces and make it standard across sites that tag. I had to redo my tags on Vox because I space-separated them, a la Flickr.

Speaking of Flickr, if you tag your images there, the tags come over to Vox when you pull a photo out of your stream for Vox. Same for the YouTube videos.

The Bottom Line

Vox is still in beta and as such, is a work in progress. However, I have no complaints at all with performance, flexibility and ease of use whatsoever. It is exactly what it’s supposed to be — a site where your mom, grandma, aunt and uncle can blog and share their interests and passions with a larger community without having to be especially savvy about anything other than how to type a bit, click and hit the “Enter” Key.

The sacrifice for simplicity is some loss of control of the overall blog design but that’s a very small price to pay when there are so many other ways to customize, lay out and personalize the blog.

One of the main reasons I’d recommend Vox right now is the ease of organizing the ever-growing body of digital content we’re all accumulating. I like being able to easily create collections of blog posts, pictures, video and audio files and have them all in one place.

My usability rating: A 4 1/2 out of 5 as it stands today. If the tagging were standardized or at least aligned with Flickr’s it would go up. Much of the rating I’ve assigned comes from how easy it was for my tween daughter to create, customize, organize and post.

Once I’ve had a chance to participate more in the community aspects, I’ll write about that. But my bottom line today is that community aspects aside, I would definitely invite my mother, stepdad, aunts, and uncles to use Vox to blog. More importantly, I’d encourage them to use Vox as a way to begin tagging and organizing their digital content NOW, before it goes out of control later.

Technorati Tags: vox, blogs, blogging, review, community, tags