"Vox"ing our private blogs

WordPress does have private blogs.

You can set your blog to private and then add users who can read it, or set up a password so that anyone with the password can view the posts.

engtech: you can’t do that post by post, though, like you can with Vox. It’s also not close to as nice a UI for doing that.

Dashboard >> Options >> Privacy >> I would like my blog to be visible only to users I choose

Then you can add up to 35 users (or unlimited users with a yearly fee)

Oh, okay.

Yeah, per post would be good. Like the flickr Friends/Family thing.

The closest WP has is Post Passwords.. so you can password protect individual posts.

You can do this post by post in WP with user level plugins.

Dawn: I don’t have plugin abilities because I’m on WordPress.com.

I also haven’t seen anything on WordPress that’s as clean as Vox. Do you have an example? Have you done a comparison?

I have certainly noticed that the “tone” I take in posting an entry is informed by the perception of a global audience. That is to say, I am keenly aware that just about *anybody* could find a post even months or years from now.

Having a kind of walled garden into which I could let a select group would no doubt change that. But then I’m reminded of the cartoon that has been displaying on the Blogshares site when it’s been down lately: mother father and son around the dinner table, father saying words to the effect of, “well, yes, we could read your blog… or you could just *tell* us about your day at school instead.” I can understand the use of the personal site to keep contact with friends and family spread over long distances. But sometimes it can get absurd.

i already invested us$30 for my account and moved my blog like a dozen times at least in the last 3 months, looking for a better blog host. wordpress so far is the most secure, most customizable, and allows for secure mapping, and domain registration. i’m not moving my blog again!!!

I haven’t used it (signing up now!) but the idea is brilliant. The name is even sexy. This is something my girlfriend might use.

Per-post privacy control functionality could be brought to WordPress (via plugin) or WordPress.com without too much trouble. First, you’d need to be able to classify your friends (Family, Friends, Contacts… Flickr-style), and then you’d need an interface for marking posts as “Public, Family, Friends, Contacts” and then a little code to enforce it on the back end.

Robert – doesn’t this apply to Live Spaces too? And if I remember, your argument was that these people wouldn’t be as attractive to advertisers – does that hold for Vox also?

Sriram: it might apply to Live Spaces, but Live Spaces is horrible compared to Vox. Have you actually used both? My wife is on Live Spaces and that service is just slow and doesn’t have nearly as many features and the UI just sucks in comparison.

As to advertisers, I don’t know how Vox is going to advertise on private groups and/or how it’ll justify the audience to advertisers. That’ll be something interesting to watch, certainly!

post-level plugin: http://fortes.com/projects
works even better as it was developed by a former microsoft employee

Vox is LiveJournal only it looks more Web 2.0

time to start looking at live.spaces.com..

you can choose to give access to everyone, messenger contacts, friends, friends of friends or a combination of the above.

if you want per post control just use hotmail or gmail.

Hi Robert. I’ve used both wordpress.com and have a wordpress.org powered site, however I do see value in a product like vox for the reasons you mention. It’s something that I can recommend to my mom or any new blogger wanting to test waters. Plus, I really like the level of privacy control that not only includes posts, but any media you upload!

I agree, the UI is awesome and very simple to use. I think Vox is a winner and has it’s place for bloggers.

Vox be just “blogs” for people who don’t want to write, rather just post pictures/videos and add in a few MySpacey comments, playing social-networking fakery games all the live long day, it’s LiveJournal gone illiterate. Wheeee. That being said, it’s STILL miles and miles beyond MSN Spaces.

I’ve been using Livejournal for about 5 years and they have *fantastic* “custom friends groups” which allow you to choose who can read what. You can make entries public, friends only, custom friends only (you can choose who can’t see the post) or completely private. I know that Livejournal isn’t really taken seriously among “bloggers”, but it has great features and an nice sense of community. It’s easy to find people talking about what you’re interested in.

I couldn’t agree more. LJ has had these features for ages…

Robert, thanks for the kind words, and I especially appreciate the honesty it takes to re-evaluate something once you’ve formed an opinion the first time.

I think one of the reasons personal/private blogging like Vox is hard for some of us with public blogs to grok is that it’s using a familiar technology in an unfamiliar way. Imagine if we’d only ever known email as a medium for newsletters and all of a sudden we were able to use it for person-to-person communication as well.

Maybe more instructive is the example of SMS text messaging on phones. The carriers thought they’d use it to send you status messages, maybe to tell you when you have voice mail. Most never imagined that people would send each other short text messages all day.

That’s part of what’s exciting to me, that a lot of us who’ve been blogging for a long time are getting to rediscover on Vox some of the reasons we started blogging in the first place.

with due respect to the bright people reading and commenting on this blog — why don’t you get it? vox is not the main course, it’s an apperetif, an appetizer, a mini-blog made for fun. it is unpretensiously easy to manipulate with a gui a 15-year old could love. after all the really heavy stuff i’ve had to wade through on blogs (posts that go on for pages), it’s a welcome change. no?

For me, Vox is my backdoor where Docuverse is my front door. I use Vox to mainly keep in touch with We Know (Joi’s WoW guild) buddies since I no longer play WoW and feel rather awkward post to We Know forum.

I invited some VCs because I thought they might enjoy forming a closed community of sort but they’ve been rather zombie like so far. Another reminder that, beyond cool-chasing crowd, features mean nothing without actual needs.

Vox definitely helps.
Previously, I had to setup new wordpress blog that was password protected and closed blog just for my family to update!

Actually strike that earlier comment … it’s easier to make my old Livejournal account a “private” blog and let my friends and family be added as LJ-friends and let them view.
This way, there one LESS new userid/pwd to remember.

I also see this user/pwd problem having an organic solution … no specific Password/Gmail/Yahoo account.
Eventually, in a few years, all the top sites will have similzr functionality and in the year 2010 the ITU-equivalent will standardize them the same way phone numbers have been.

You can do private post-by-post on WordPress.com: when writing, do these things:

1) Under “Post Status” Tab, click on the button that says “private”.
2) Under “Post Password”, add the password you want.
3) After publishing post, the title (let’s call it “Testing”), will be called “Protected: Testing”, and a password field will show up. Only people who know the password, logged in or not, can then access the post.

How does that help?