Vox, The TRUE Blogging Community in my Heart

I can't believe I'm sad that Vox is no longer going to be around after September 30. This is not in a bad way I'm saying this I just mean I've met some really cool people through Vox. To me Vox was the "nicer" version of Facebook.

I first heard about when I peeped in on my twitter account checking tweets aimed at me and there it was from my photo sis @Liv_Luv_Diamond,

"@myloveformusic2 @ItsMsJ2u @mission2be did my other tweeps hear Vox is closing 9/30?"

jaw dropped.

I went over to my Vox account and sure enough here is what it said...

"Vox has been a fun place to explore, create and connect with your friends. But Vox is closing its doors on September 30, 2010.

This doesn't mean you have to say goodbye to your blog. We want you to make sure you can keep the great content you’ve shared on Vox, and continue to have a home for your blog. To help you make the transition off of Vox, we’ve added new export features that make it easy to move your blog to a free TypePad account, and your photos & videos to Flickr.

If you’re an active Vox member we encourage you to read the information below about what's happening during the month of September, and learn more about how you can migrate your content.[ http://closing.vox.com/ ]"

Mena Trott

Wow. That's all I could muster out. If you didn't join Vox in the beginning (I joined September 26, 2006) this may seem kinda hokey but people connected on Vox as in marriage. People became partners in regards to starting blogs, podcasts, where we swapped ideas. For me Vox had something that Facebook will NEVER have...intimacy and being safe. Even though Six Apart is allowing people to move their post over to TypePad it's not the same. Six Apart owns TypePad and Movable Type but still, it's not the same.

For me when you marked your post as private, they were private. When you placed photos or audio or video it just seemed like a cool place to be. It's really weird describing a blogging community in this way but it was. My lil geek sis @HappilyCandied mentioned she had to hold back the tears when she first hold the news because she felt like she was losing a lot of herself and to be honest I know how she feels, I really do. To me for a long while Vox was the place you hung, met intelligent people, conversed on a high-brow level and to me Facebook is the opposite: it's a place to show your face only when you want promote something and to me that is the only thing Facebook is good for, nothing more.

But many of us drank the FB/Twitter Kool-Aid. Slowly but surely more and more people began migrating over there and in the end when going back to Vox it became a wasteland of Spam where you had to lock down your site tight. But every time I ventured back over there it was like a place still you didn't mind visiting...like an old friend. I began a short-lived tech podcast over there. I met people like Ms. Jo Ladie,  VoxEfx,  Melissa,  EJ,  Amneris, A. Diamond,  Julia,  Mixed-Passionate-Honey,  M. Michelle, Anewlis, RPM, Fave and his wife Eve, Todd Kelley, Doug Fresh, Koa, Jenn Mc, Mami Rosi, and of course my geeks for life: Suni, Steve, Jennifer, and Lauren. (As you can see many hadn't posted over there in some time but still...). Many of us may not have met face to face but we still keep in touch to this day, that was the cool connection of Vox. You felt like a true neighborhood.  In a way we all had to grow and move on but in way I think some of us wished we would have stayed with Vox.

Throughout the month I will post links of some of my favorite Vox posts I created and going through my neighborhood throughout the month to see if I come across some of my Vox buds so I can pass on my site links.

Sorry we took you for granted Vox. To me you will ALWAYS be the real blogging community.