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This week, sharing your thoughts. Ironic, isn't it, the “online journal”. Back in the old days a diary was a private thing, a secret friend with a papery face who hid in your bedroom and recorded your thoughts. These days it's barely worth having any thoughts at all unless you're going to instantly multicast them to anything with a screen. But what myriad ways we have to do it.Vox is the latest. Created by Six Apart, the company famed for creating the Movable Type blogging software, it'll be instantly familiar to anyone who's dabbled in LiveJournal (eg, anyone under 20). This is unlikely to be a coincidence, as LiveJournal was recently acquired by the startup. However, with its clean Web 2.0 looks and Flickr integration, Vox represents something of a fresh start for Six Apart and the community it has built (or bought); a chance to escape LJ's reputation - for better or worse – for being full of angst-ridden teenagers. In a way it’s a site for that very same community as they mature and begin to look for something more from their blogging tools. At the time of writing, Vox certainly feels like the strongest competitor to myspace, though we're unlikely to see that site’s dominance diminish in the near future, even with a user base of easily distracted teenagers and us, the notoriously fickle web audience. Honestly, we’d get excited about a ball of tin foil if you stuck it on the internet and forced it to emit an RSS feed. We are an audience who can now choose to host our lives on an array of free sites that include Blogger (owned by Google), Wordpress (open source) and DeadJournal (LiveJoural’s gothic twin), not to mention the big “social networking” sites created by Microsoft and Yahoo!. And, of course, even Collective. With so much choice, in one respect it’s a great time to start publishing your thoughts, and the clever thing about the new blogging sites with social networks is that you can limit who has access to your content. But there’s one key thing to remember here: if you have a secret that you want to keep, for god’s sake don’t publish it on the internet. It’s that simple.
David Thair
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 useful linkswww.livejournal.com www.blogger.com wordpress.com www.deadjournal.com spaces.msn.com 360.yahoo.com
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 webslinky #089stickers  webslinky #092internet archives  webslinky #091adventure  webslinky #090omg!  webslinky #088web of deceit
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