Six Apart preps blogging service for newbies

Six Apart Ltd. aspires to extend its broad presence in the blogging services and software market with a new offering for consumers that want an easy to use yet feature-rich blog publishing service.

The company will launch the new service, called Vox, on Thursday with high hopes of attracting people who are interested in communicating via a blog but who don't want to deal with the technology behind the process.

Vox will join a market crowded with blog publishing competitors that have millions of users like Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live Spaces and Google Inc.'s Blogger, as well as social networks with integrated blogging services like News Corp.'s MySpace and Yahoo Inc.'s Yahoo 360.

Vox will also encounter a couple of services from its own company: the blog publishing service TypePad and the social network LiveJournal which has a strong blogging component. Mena Trott, Six Apart's president and co-founder, maintains that each service appeals to a different type of person.

TypePad, which requires a fee, is aimed at bloggers with a certain degree of technical savvy and an interest in drawing large audiences to their sites. Meanwhile, LiveJournal, which has free and fee-based levels of service, is more of a social network that generally appeals to people under 25, she said.

Vox is for people who want a simple yet elegant service to reach a small and select group of family and friends. Thus, it lets people set different privacy levels to their blog's content. And it makes ample use of wizards and point-and-click menus to design the blog.

Vox, which is free, lets users import audio, video, photos and other content from services like the photo sharing sites Flickr and Photobucket, and the video sharing site YouTube. Vox also provides integration with mobile devices that run on the Palm OS, Symbian OS and Windows Mobile platforms. The service also lets publishers deliver their blogs' content via syndicated feeds.

Despite the competition, Vox has a good chance to build a large following because it is very well designed and because a lot of room for growth remains in the market for consumer blog publishing services, an analyst said.

"There are lots of people who aren't blogging," said Joe Wilcox, a Jupiter Research analyst. "Vox is going after the mass market: people who want to blog and to have a beautiful site but don't want to roll up their sleeves and get dirty with the technology."

Wilcox has used Vox and is impressed with its ease of use, its set of features and its appealing and numerous layout templates. He cautions that people desiring a flexible platform that allows deep customization of blogs should looks elsewhere to a service like Blogger or Typepad.

With Vox, Six Apart now covers a wide territory in blogging services and software, including the market for organizations and companies, which it serves with its Movable Type blogging platform.