Current Events Miscellaneous

For those with a personal blog…

A recent Economist article (see a reprint at the Librarian’s Place blog) chronicles the career of Mena Trott.  Mrs. Trott (along with her husband) founded Six Apart, a company whose blogging enterprises include Typepad, Movable Type and Live Journal.  The most recent and perhaps most profound innovation by the couple at Six Apart is the blogging software named Vox.  Mrs. Trott has her own blog on Vox, appropriately named VoxTrott.  The most significant advance Vox makes is the following:

It is intimate. For every item on Vox—a text paragraph, a photo, a link—bloggers can determine if it is to be public or private and, if it is private, exactly who can see it. Ms Trott, for instance, keeps one part of VoxTrott for communicating only with her mother, who has an insatiable appetite for information about certain minutiae of Ms Trott’s life. She also has a daily “Yay Me Updateâ€? just for herself, in which she uploads self-portraits from her mobile phone in order to preserve a chronicle of her life for her descendants—uninterrupted except for that time when she gained a bit more weight than she cared to commit to memory and conveniently forgot to post for a few days.

While I have not tried to use this software—and it seems unsuitable for professional purposes—the variable level of privacy will be a significant advance for the blog-o-sphere.