It's a dour, bread-line, grey-scale world that doesn't have room for Vox. But unfortunately, that's the world of today's Great Recession. Consider Vox's Web traffic rank performance, as measured by Alexa.com today:
Not anything to write home about, but not too shabby, either. That upward trend is powerful. Either way though, not good enough to survive these times, at least not without being a non-profit.
Since I wrote a good chunk of the JavaScript on Vox, including much of the editor where you type in your blog post, I'm no indifferent judge. It's indisputable however that from the get-go, Vox's specifications were handcrafted by people who knew blogging as well or better than anyone. Many of Vox's features, such as double-click on a link to edit the url, are still missing from major Web deployments like Yahoo E-mail's rich-text editor. Vox's heap-tree autocomplete tagging was one of the first of its kind on the Web, while many of today's implementations, such as jQuery's lame 'indexOf' search, are still brute-force.
Vox finds its home with the NPR set and similar demographics. Yet with a shrinking middle class, the audience for these types of ventures is smaller and not as spendy. So "social" went almost wholly to brief "status" messages and not to Vox's social blogging. I myself mostly posted on my computer-oriented ComputerBurn Vox blog and not my personal one, although I was more squeezed for time in these past couple of years than usual.
I'd like to think that the future will offer a chance for a new Vox. Maybe not for years, but someday. Once again, good job everyone who put their extensive know-how and passion for delivering value to the customer into making Vox. Vox is dead. Long Live Vox.
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