Comments | no_lj_ads: Correction and some Wired articles of interest

foxfirefey in no_lj_ads

Correction and some Wired articles of interest

Nov 09, 2006 02:34

anildash kindly corrects me on Vox having/not having communities in the future: "That being said, I'm not saying whether Vox will or won't have communities -- as far as I know, we haven't announced either way yet. My guess is we're going to just listen to the feedback people submit and judge by that, same as with everything else ( Read more... )

vox, sixapart, the press, staff talking, sup

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kunzite1 November 9 2006, 15:03:34 UTC

A real attention to privacy and control, which allows you to feel that you have a lot of flexibility in who can see your stuff

they keep pushing that they've got these awesome ways for security with entries.

excuse me? LJ's had that since like forever. it's nothing new.

And then the ability to play well with other web services. We integrate well with Flickr, YouTube, Amazon, Photobucket and iFilm

vox also integrates well with other services? heh, it took a while for vox video to be happy on LJ. and they've also got video from other sites that can be embedded as well. again, nothing new.

Six Apart, the San Francisco company that operates some of the world's most popular blogging platforms: TypePad, Movable Type and LiveJournal.

Right now, on the smallest level, TypePad blogs can cross post to Vox. It will give you an option to add, "I'll be writing about this on Vox." That's just one example. We imagine we'll have it for all of our products, including Movable Type.movable type and typepad are not very different. typepad ( ... )

matgb November 9 2006, 17:47:53 UTC

See, a selection of premium services (stats, trackback, more links) is definately something I'd buy.

Vox does appear to be eating people away from LJ. This is BAD, competing products from the same company don't work. If they'd integrate the two sites, but with a different UI then that would both be cool and make sense; it's aimed at a different market but integrates with the crossover. Gah!

Such basic business positioning errors. Ah well, I can alway export to Wordpress and have done with it...

kunzite1 November 9 2006, 17:52:50 UTC

how would you propose an integration of the sites?

matgb November 9 2006, 18:04:18 UTC

Ah, see, that's where it gets technical. And I don't do technical.

Given that Vox and LJ are both OpenID compliant, I'd have thought shared cookies or logons would be possible. Adding Voxers directly to your friends list and LJers to your neighbourhood should be fairly easy to do if they managed to get the databases to talk, it would be effectively like syndication. Post security levels would be harder I suspect, but there y'go, I don't do technical.

That my vox exists on LJ as an OpenID login (because all my OpenID accounts are set up here because I am that obsessive) is a bit daft; why can't they just integrate seeing as the servers are in the same room?

But, y'know, technicals. I'll leave that to people that do that.

kunzite1 November 9 2006, 18:10:39 UTC

you answered part of my question anyway. :)

speaking of having all of one's openid accounts on LJ... i guess you haven't seen kunzite1_openid yet. ;)

matgb November 9 2006, 18:27:04 UTC

Genius. You're missing ClaimID and Typekey for the obviously useful ones. That's crazy.

I will, hoever, link to that from my post about it for my friends (was going to write a how-to in a very similar manner), turns out that a number of people read my public stuff without commenting, but don't want LJ accounts. If they sould fix the comment box to let you comment the way you can on other boxes, they'd do that as well. Gah!

I like the idea of claimid though, a nice profile page with a high google PR just for the sake of it. Haven't started bombing it yet, but I'm top 20 results for my name anyway...

kunzite1 November 10 2006, 14:36:26 UTC

link away! i'd be interested in seeing the post you make or have made already on the subject.

i'll check out this "claimid" stuff.

whee!

matgb November 14 2006, 10:18:56 UTC

Claimid is a fairly smart idea, ext_15389 is me, although I don't really need it. Essentially a very customisable profile page that has lots of links to your other sites or online presences, basically a slimmed down verion of what Anil has done with anildash.com. Go to profile, find the stuff of interest elsewhere.

It has the advantage of much google juice as you're encouraged to link to your profile page and use it in comment boxes, so it'll likely be top search result for your name. Nifty little idea that is very useful for those that don't want their own name/domain profile page. Especially useful for those with fairly common names.

I'll write up my post on LJ's comment system at some point when I'm at home, vacation in London at the moment, I'm sipping my morning coffee on a friends T1 line while he's at work :-D

beckyzoole November 9 2006, 19:38:51 UTC

Given that Vox and LJ are both OpenID compliant, I'd have thought shared cookies or logons would be possible.

Exactly!

Internal competition makes no sense. But two products that complement each other? Genius.

Unfortunately, I don't see yet how Vox and LJ complement each other. They're just too similar.

On the other hand, Vox is less customizable and more automatic. It could be marketed as blogging for dummies, with LJ marketed as blogging for technorati. And that might be what the whole LJers-are-teens angle is all about.

matgb November 9 2006, 20:06:12 UTC

Similar, but not the same. Can you imagine the havoc that would've been created if they'd introduced the Vox theming UI as an option on LJ?

It's far too quick, simple and easy to use, the LJ userbase would've hated it, compared it to MySpace (because they always do, even when it's so totally not similar) and set up another bloody petition.

The integration with Amazon et al? That's sponsorship, that's evil corporate interference, LJ has sold out and is the devil, etc. The small point that some of us want to integrate books we recommend onto our layout at times would be because we're corporate whores, etc. Because, y'know, plugging a book documenting govt hypocrisy and support for torture is really helping out The Man ( ... )

foxfirefey November 9 2006, 20:21:23 UTC

The integration with Amazon et al? That's sponsorship, that's evil corporate interference, LJ has sold out and is the devil, etc. The small point that some of us want to integrate books we recommend onto our layout at times would be because we're corporate whores, etc.

I think people would be edgy and sensitive about that stuff because of the other commercialization stuff, assuming they would be--ie, their sensitivity levels have raised. (Mine probably have.) The complaints I heard about the YouTube integration were rarely ever about sponsorship.

matgb November 9 2006, 20:53:32 UTC

I was basically rambling on the 'if they'd done this instead' thing, what the reactions would have been.

I don't recall many complaints about youtube integration, apart from lack of placeholders (which, y'know bother flashblocked me not at all, but there are people out there who don't use this extension. This bothers me, but...).

Also, YouTube isn't selling something directly, but any Amazon integration is by default trying to sell books, it's an advert, even if it is the good viral stuff that people actually like (because great books are great books, you gotta buy them from someone).

What was the gripe over YouTube I missed?

foxfirefey November 9 2006, 21:01:59 UTC

I was basically rambling on the 'if they'd done this instead' thing, what the reactions would have been.I think much of the discussion would have centered around the affiliate link stuff. Whether or not paid users would get to put their own affiliate links in as opposed to Six Apart's (like they do on Vox), etc. It's possible that at some point, we'll be able to test out these theories--if Amazon affiliate links prove a decent enough revenue stream on Vox, moving the ability over to LJ would become more attractive. I guess there might also be people who, being paid users, would consider the Amazon placements an advertisement and want to be exempt. And sure, you could say that the putting up of the Amazon book stuff was the user's choice and that their beef should really be with the user. But then again, that was always the argument about Basic users being exposed to ads on Plus users' journals, soooo ( ... )

ex_shattered767 November 10 2006, 02:43:48 UTC

"Some people didn't want YouTube embedded at all; they didn't see why people couldn't just link to the video on YouTube and didn't want people cluttering up their friends list with the embedded ones."

YouTube imbedding is what caused me to install Flashblock. And I can't be the only person who did.

ex_uniquewo November 10 2006, 04:41:58 UTC

"Similar, but not the same. Can you imagine the havoc that would've been created if they'd introduced the Vox theming UI as an option on LJ?

It's far too quick, simple and easy to use, the LJ userbase would've hated it, compared it to MySpace (because they always do, even when it's so totally not similar) and set up another bloody petition.

You're exaggerating and you know it. LJ theming UI when it comes to Expressive is not that hard to figure out. Harder than in Vox, yes but, to make that easy, you need to have fewer options, and that's what happens in Vox. Some people won't care, especially with a brand new blog but some people will start wanting something a little more... them instead of a duplicate of everybody else's blog. Vox can't give you that.

matgb November 10 2006, 04:45:28 UTC

Oh, I agree completely, and yes, hyperbole on the user reaction, but at times the drama does get to me. The sky hasn't fallen.

It's just slowly collapsing.

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