Transcript: Let's Try it Again, A Blog Solution for Everyday People

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1374/lets-try-it-again-a-blog-solution-for-everyday-people

Guest: Mena Trott - Six Apart
Host: Jason Lopez - PodTech News

Mena Trott - Six Apart
Fox, really in a nutshell is kind of the idea of blogging for the rest of the population.

Jason Lopez - PodTech News
This is PodTech.net, welcome to Web 2.0 Voices, I am Jason Lopez. When you think of blogging, perhaps you think of BoingBoing or 43 Folders; conventional wisdom, if such a thing really exists for web properties like this, and it's early in the game, is to get lots of readers to eventually sell advertising, but the real transformation of communication on the web isn't professional media trying to reach a large audience or even amateur media reaching a large audience. If you take your cue from Six Apart's Mena Trott, the Founder and President of the company, it's about millions of people each reaching their friends and families with something that one might think of as not blogs. She calls it Vox.

Mena Trott - Six Apart
Focusing on small numbers of communication you know writing for my family and friends versus writing for the blogging world at large, you know, that's the -- one of the main goals, as well as having a service that really plays well with a lot of different web services.

Jason Lopez - PodTech News
Why would we need Vox when we already have WordPress and we already have Google, Blogger and other kinds of software out there that seems to very quick to use.

Mena Trott - Six Apart
Yeah. So I mean, Vox is easy to use, but also, it has so many different features that those other services don't have; for example, with the privacy which is a huge thing. All the other services, with the exception of with LiveJournal, which is ours and some other new ones that are starting out, their privacy controls are very binary, I know with blogger you have to have - you blog the 'all private' or 'all public'. I am not sure what WordPress.com or WordPress offers, but with Vox we make it so, almost every single thing you insert into you post, including the post, has a privacy setting. So, I write a post about my vacation I am taking and I am not comfortable sharing the photos of my kids -- I don't have kids but if I had them, I wouldn't be comfortable sharing them. I can make those photos 'friends or family only' inside a post that may be publicly viewable; so the people who come from the public that see it, they won't know they're missing anything - and that's one of our big goals with Vox, is not to make people feel like they're missing content or they're being excluded, it's just, if you don't have permission it just doesn't appear to you.

Jason Lopez - PodTech News
How does Vox advance the blogging technology or the blogosphere?

Mena Trott - Six Apart
Okay. So one of the biggest ways we think it does is, by bringing people in that currently don't have a presence in blogs; they have no interest to publish to.

Jason Lopez - PodTech News
Why is it that they have no presence?

Mena Trott - Six Apart
The real -- we think that there is really three reasons from what we have heard is, one, they feel like they have nothing to say - or nothing good to say; two, they don't have the time, and then three, they don't want to publish to the world, they want their privacy. So, we feel like we've tackled through (ph) and we have talked about that just now -- the time so, I can -- if you ever look at inbox or if I show a demo, you can see how we do YouTube integration or Flickr integration. All this stuff is in the app of Vox, you don't have to go out to YouTube to find a video; you can do a search query within - click on the one button and then you're closed. So, people will have behaviors to go on YouTube or go on Flickr or Amazon, but the process now is too hard where you have to do a copy of UL, and paste it in, or some Java Script to paste it in. But then having things to say is the biggest reason; because blogging has been positioned so much as it's about you publishing out to an audience and everybody who is going to read it is so interested in what you're saying because it's a lofty or important topic or it's actually written well or this -- all of these things.

What we're saying is, it's not about that sort of publishing; it's about the people on the other end wanting to hear what you have to say because they care about you as a person. And I would rather have six people who are really engaged and know me who I am and read it -- based on reading about my life than having 60,000 people just coming on to my blog because someone's linked to me. And so, kind of talking to people - like my best friend; she would never use any web products because she had no interest in blogging. I spun it as, you had another baby just now, you have two kids, I never see pictures of them because I don't -- she's maybe put -- it's on a Kodak service or something, and it's just not engaging. I said, just do it so we can keep up; and that makes sense to her, and she's already invited her brother and sister and her friend from Sacramento who has no interest in blogging either, and now they're doing this communication which is amazing.

Jason Lopez - PodTech News
Sort of like a cross mass email in a sense in terms of how people connect to each other.

Mena Trott - Six Apart
Yeah, it's a great analogy; we could think about what we're doing is that email and the family newsletter combined, but in a way that -- people who are listening to this probably know the benefits of blogs; archives are amazing, you're able to insert video and audio, you don't have to worry about pushing content on to people, they can come and see it in their own time. I don't want to receive an email with 30 photos; I do want to go to my friend's blog and see that she just uploaded 30 photos and look at them very quickly. It's improving the techniques that people are familiar with. And then you go farther and say, its very understandable that in your group of friends, or in your group of families, that there is always people in those groups that are the people who document and organize and plan the reunion and take the photos and write the newsletter - and then the rest of the people are more observers. People on Vox don't have to blog; they can be part of the conversation by just reading and commenting; and that's good enough for us.

Jason Lopez - PodTech News
It sounds like the word 'blog' could be kind of an obstacle in some ways.

Mena Trott - Six Apart
Yeah, and we actually are positioning it more as Vox that we -- there is this in-between time where we have to make it clear what we're doing, but going forward we like people to be thinking that what they're doing is different than blogging. I am already comfortable saying, “No, I posted that to my Vox,” rather than posted into my blog, because it's kind of a understanding that I am going to be posting that somewhere to a blog. But posting it to Vox, just like people say Flickr, you know, it's very different.

Jason Lopez - PodTech News
Who do you expect the biggest user group to be for Vox?

Mena Trott - Six Apart
So, we expect the biggest - the age?

Jason Lopez - PodTech News
Age or whatever kind of demographic that you think is most effective to talk about.

Mena Trott - Six Apart
So, we're thinking skewing (ph) older than the traditional web user, which is probably late 25 to 40, we think it is that sort of organizer in the social group of yours, the best people who are actually getting into Vox are the people who have blogging spouses already because they haven't been able to be interested in what their spouse has been doing because the tools have been too hard, or not for them, and so we're seeing a lot of that. And eventually as we do more community stuff, things like book close (ph) and all the types of groups that don't have -- you know, they maybe using Yahoo! groups now, but that's not working for them. They're definitely, probably not the people who are blogging right now; and if they are blogging, they are not going to give up their existing tool because it's a different purpose. We are seeing a lot of people especially on something like TypePad where they're blogging professionally. They're using it to generate revenues and to actually represent themselves online; they are not going to turn it away, they're going to use this to talk to the people who are not part of that other world.

Jason Lopez - PodTech News
Alright well Mena thank you so much for being on this Podcast.

Mena Trott - Six Apart
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Jason Lopez - PodTech News
Mena Trott is the founder and president of Six Apart in San Francisco.