At the end of the month, Vox is closing their doors for good. For those who missed it, Vox was a blogging platform. Made public in 2006, Vox took off as something more of a social blogging site. You had friends on the site in the form of “neighbors” who you could connect to and be updated whenever they made a new post. At the time, there weren’t many other outlets in the blogging family. You basically had WordPress and Blogger, the latter just being WordPress-based anyway. So when Vox came out, it attracted a lot of attention and really caused something of a social blogging revolution. Since Vox, there have been different takes on the idea with sites like Tumblr and their use of followers, but the true essence of Vox hasn’t been duplicated on any other platform.

I started my first blog on Vox. I only had maybe two or three posts there, but I loved the platform as a way to keep in touch with my friends. If you have ever made friends on an IRC channel, you know that just about everyone has their own blog, and these can be hard to keep track of. When 30 people all have their blogs in one place, this becomes much much more manageable. The popularity of Vox soon dwindled. I remember even back when I was using it, people were closing their accounts up within months of starting them. I soon closed down mine as well and adapted the posts I had there to a Drupal installation on a shared hosting account myself and my friends had. After that, it was from one WordPress installation to another and who knows what the future holds.

While free blogging platforms are still surviving, serious users will always be tempted to go bigger and better and get their own hosted CMS with plugins and extensions. While Vox may seem like a lost site with no merit, it holds a place as a stepping stone for many bloggers and will definitely be missed as time goes on.