All good things come to an end. Six Apart is closing down theVox website - Leo and Amber atNet@Night are speculating thatPosterous andTumblr were the harbingers of doom.
I can remember Vox starting out - I was in the beta programme, before it got released to the public. The first members were mainly from the web design and development community in San Francisco, which made me something of an outsider. Many people don’t remember that Vox was widely seen as “LiveJournal 2” - and bizarrely, has now been outlived by it’s spiritual ancestor.
The death of Vox brings to attention the content we are all creating, and sharing. Those who had invested huge swathes of their life in Vox are now madly scrambling - trying to find a way to get their writing and photos back out of the system. Luckily this time there is a route out (posterous), but imagine if Blogger or WordPress ended their hosted blogs… “exodus” is a word that springs to mind.
I’ve flip-flopped several times between hosting my own blog, and entrusting it to WordPress. The end of Vox has brought it back to mind - not from a security standpoint, but from a content ownership standpoint.
How much do I value my old content? Should I take ownership of it - look after it ?