Ben Bleikamp posts that SixApart, and in particular, Vox sucks.

He has a go at some of SixApart’s other products, and sure, there’s been some mistakes in the past, decisions that certainly I’ve been very vocally against, but their products (MT, TypePad, LiveJournal) work for the people who use them, and I would presume have worked for SixApart in a business sense as well.

But on Vox, I think Ben’s totally wrong, and I think Anil Dash totally hit it on the head in the comments:

I think the key thing that informs your frustration /dismissal /whatever for a lot of our work comes from your assumptions that everyone who blogs is like you, or blogs for similar reasons that you do. And, well, they don?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢t.

It’s easy enough to do. I deal with some one every day who suffers from the same affliction. Some where along the line I learnt that I don’t know everything, that I’m not always right, and that everything out there isn’t meant to work the way I want it to, or in the case of products, play the way I want them to. I wish I could remember when that day was, I’m not sure if it was a year or two ago, but knowing that I’m not always right and there are different ways to look at things would be the single most important step in my life so far. It changed my life, and now, particularly with b5media, I listen, and listen, and listen. Not just pretend listening, but real listening. When I ask for feedback, I take in what I’m told. Don’t always agree, but if the person giving me the feedback knows more about their channel or niche, unless it’s outrageously bad, I act and do as they wish, not as others who think they know everything and seek to impose their will on every decision, every small detail, and indeed even my freedom to speak my mind, do. Web 2.0 is about empowering the individual and the wisdom of crowds. Old world one person is right about everything because they can be structures are business models that are doomed to failure.

But I digress, because I don’t believe Vox sucks. Sure, it doesn’t do everything, it’s not the smartest and most whizbang social networking package there is, but I’ve found it a great allround package that brings in some of the experience SixApart has in blogging, and has blended that with social networking. It’s clean, it stable, it’s fairly easy to use… I don’t know whether it will be a massive hit or not, crowded marketplace and all, but I would have thought that SixApart would have done it’s homework here on unmet niche’s in social networking communities and catered for one/ some as a result of that.

Tags: Web 2.0, SixApart, Vox, Anil Dash, b5media, CEO, censorship

37Signals on the rise of Social Bookmarking Icons at the bottom of blog posts. OK, so we use these icons on b5media, however when I’ve set them up I’ve never used the default 55 different odd social bookmarking services in one line setting, I’ve always set them only to services I believe readers are more likely to use. In our case: De.licio.us, Digg, Spurl, Furl and Yahoo. Admitedly I’ve never used Spurl or Furl, but certainly I had heard of them when we started rolling these buttons out on some of our blogs, and hence that list of 5 became the standard. In retrospect I’d probably delete one of the *url sites and put Reddit in its place, but I’ll leave that for another day. As for others with all these button, I ask this question: why the hell are you offering buttons to services you’ve never heard of, or used? OK, so there’s some benefit in offering some of these buttons, but 20, 30 and even more services? I don’t agree with 37signals, I do believe there is a place for them, but everything is better in moderation. Pick 5, and leave it at that.

Marshall Kirkpatrick interviews Andrew Anker from SixApart.

Interesting read, and where as I’d question some of SixApart’s business decisions in the past, I’m totally on board with Vox. Not only is it a great social networking and blogging platform, I still think the marketplace in terms of social networking isn’t saturated, and there is still room at the table. It is saturated though when it comes to MySpace clones, you’d be nuts doing a MySpace clone now, but Vox takes a different approach, in deed you can feel and see the blogging roots in the product. I guess from a marketing, or even promotional viewpoint is how do you then measure the demographics you’re appealing to, and wanting to sell to? I know Vox is a great product, but it’s not totally obvious to me what the core target demographic is. Same goes for a whole pile of other services as well. It’s not obvious, and hence it’s not always easy. Best of luck to the SixApart team on this one, and it will be interesting to watch how it goes over the next 6-12 months.

Tags: SixApart, Vox

Reuters reports that the U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday unveiled its own secret internal wiki, saying that Wikipedia’s format is key to the future of American espionage.

Struth.

No word as to what wiki platform they are running on, but given the comparisons to Wikipedia you’d guess they’re using mediawiki. Unfortunately the service wasn’t named spookipedia, but Intellipedia. Reuters does have some fun however, suggesting that the new wiki service could prevent further WMD-Iraq style situations.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Journal points to Compete’s Snapshot, a new service offering Alexa like stats. From what I can gather the company compares itself more to comScore in it’s methodology, promoting the service as the “First premium web metrics tool made available for free”. The stats come from over 2 million users of the Compete Toolbar, so the data gathering is similar to Alexa’s, however they are primarily focused on the US market, where as Alexa looks at traffic worldwide.

Question is I guess: are the figures any good?

My gut feeling after plonking in a few sites is that they are as nearly as good as Alexa’s figures, with the proviso that Alexa’s figures are at best questionable. You get the visitor figures for a month, not daily like Alexa, but the actual data itself is fairly rich including uniques, a rank, page views per visit and time spent on the site. However despite the service playing up it’s advantages over Alexa in the FAQ, I don’t think it’s anywhere near being an Alexa killer yet. People like the up to date stats in Alexa where as monthly stats from Snapshot are sort of nice, but certainly isn’t going to drive demand to the site when you see the same figures for the whole month. And yet, competition is always healthy, so best of luck to the team at Snapshot.

Tags: Alexa, snapshot

Congrats to Cam on the news that TPN and News Corp have hooked up to produce a celebrity podcast for news.com.au, one of Australia’s leading online news sites. Nice to see Australian companies looking at doing deals like this, now if only they’d get their chequebooks out and fund TPN so we can keep it here in Australia instead of losing it to the States.

Fortune reports that Yahoo! is in talks with Time Warner to acquire AOL. Naturally it makes business sense but every time one of the bigger companies are gobbled up, that’s one less major site/ competitor out there, and further consolidates internet traffic at the top. OK, so we all know the barrier to entry onto the web is low, but every day it gets harder and harder, indeed even impossible to start a new service that would seriously be able to compete with the existing players. Where as Google came around at the right time, there probably will never be another Google, baring some magical technology advance, and given Google is still the leader in search the chances of someone else coming up with it is next to zero.

Read/Write Web reports on Pluck shutting down. It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last. Certainly this was one of the better offerings out there as well.

Mike Arrington with the good news for those who cant get a ticket. I’m not sure I’m allowed to say from who, but I managed to get a ticket so I’ll be in NY on the 16th. My first trip to the States as well, and all for a tech party, so here’s hoping it’s all good, which I’m sure it will be. Given there will now be 2 parties and if you’re chasing a ticket, I’d sign up to the waiting list quick smart.

I’m particularly looking forward to meeting some of the event’s sponsors, Blog Talk Radio would be top of the list: I still think it’s a facinating idea, Right Media with their ad auction service should be of interest, plus obviously some of the other Web 2.0 startups, both from a personal interest perspective and looking at some of the services on offer in relation to what we are doing at b5media. Of course did I forget to mention the opportunity to meet some great Web 2.0 people in the Capital of the free world?! fun, fun.

Tags: TechCrunch, TechCrunch New York

Lots of positive press on the launch of Google Coop. I’m not one for reannouncing what a whole pile of other sites have already written about, but having spent a couple of hours playing with the service, I’ve got to say that although there are a few rough edges, in terms of what it delivers, it’s brilliant. It’s what Adsense for search should have been like all along…and indeed, you can get Adsense earnings from the program, although via the odd method of matching your accounts up (if you’re like me, you’ve got every single Google service including Adwords with your gmail account…and yet still I can’t use the gmail login for Adsense! go figure). OK, so some are saying it’s like Rollyo, but personally Rollyo had little appeal for me, this on the other hand does. I can combine sites for custom search engines or just do it for one site. Loren from over at Blog Search Engine is implementing it as the sites standard search facility…and knowing his traffic that speaks volumes for me as well. If you haven’t tried it yet it’s worth a look, and if you want to try it here, it’s in the sidebar. So long Adsense for search, hello Co-op!

Tags: Google Co-op