5 posts tagged “vox”
Things I like about vox:
In the English language, lists are organized with commas.
I went to the store and bought
grapes, some cereal, steak, and yogurt
Which is why I've never understood why Flicker wants you to write it like this:
grapes "some cereal" steak yogurt
As they helpfully point out on every tag page, " Separate each tag with a space: cameraphone urban moblog. Or to join 2 words together in one tag, use double quotes: "daily commute"." Clear as mud.
When I made a tagging technology demo several years ago, I thought for a minute and realized that Flickr and delicious were simply wrong. I guess you can argue that it's more typing to have to put a comma between every tag. But it's more consistent, even when you have two or more words in a tag. Clearly Flickr and delicious was wrong, I thought, so I went with the correct approach, commas.
I got a lot of flak from people who argued that delicious and Flickr did it one way, so any splintering of approaches was bad. "Why should I have to remember to use commas on your site when everyone else does it the same way?"
I had three points:
- My little page will only be seen by a few people. I'm not exactly disrupting the internet.
- Commas are clearly better because they're more consistent and more natural.
- I'm going to use what's best, not blindly follow for the sake of following.
I'm happy to see that Vox gets it right. And look at how simple their help text is:
"Separate tags with commas".
Clear as day.
I didn't realize Vox officially launched. Huzzah!
Vox is easily my favorite bloggy place. I've been in online communities since the 80's, and Vox has solved a common problem very well: as soon as the community becomes too large or too varied, it loses some of its charm. What Vox has done, thanks to its highly integrated photos/videos/books/music features, is make me feel close to anyone's page I visit.
Compare it to MySpace. I visit someone's page and I see a large picture of them doing a keg stand. Then I see about 30 comments from their friends saying things like "DUDE! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN!!?" with (very large) pictures of people hanging out at parties or throwing up animated gifs of George W. Bush's head exploding. It's like that all the way down the page.
MySpace yells "here's how I party", Vox says "here's who I am".
Additionally, I think they've tapped into one of the most important aspects of any startup, product, or online community: I am very fond of the site and the people I meet on here. I want to see Vox succeed. It's not just a corporation to me, it's a well executed idea I want to help grow.
Happy launch, Vox.
We're going meta today: What questions would you'd like to see become QoTDs?
What was the best part of your day today? What was the worst?
What song have you listened to the most? (in itunes, you can see play counts) Apparently, mine is Jesus, Etc. by Wilco. Huh.
Where was your last vacation?
What's the single most important thing you'd teach someone who wanted to break into your field?
What's in your wallet or purse?
[update: wow, within a couple minutes, three people wrote. No more invites, sorry!]
Not just starters, either. Actual, honest-to-goodness invites.
My co-workers always ask for these things and don't use them. My friends don't care.
Do you want one?
