Voxy 4 You

When I was sixteen or seventeen or something like that me and a friend wandered into a steak shop in West Philly that we'd heard tell of. The place was called Abe's and there was a room in the back that was possibly smaller than the office I sit in today. It was packed and it stank so bad of sweat and beer and stank, but OH! the girls were really cute and kind of fucked-up looking with mismatched knee socks and interesting hair and thrift store dresses held together with safety pins.

And there was music! and it wasn't played very well, but it was played fast and hard and it was being played by PEOPLE I KNEW! And those PEOPLE I KNEW were playing short fast songs about not having money and going to the Jersey shore and Bitchin' Camaros. And, oh man, I had found SOMETHING, that in its attempt to be unimportant had managed to be worthwhile.

Anyone could do this. This is the simple most important thing I've learned in life. Anybody can do this.

Fast-forward a while to this thing called the Web. And again, anybody can do this. The early days (at least what I define as the early days) of the web gave me that same feeling as that stanky steak house. People had no idea what to do on the web, so they would try ANYTHING, and it was fucking glorious. People were failing in amazing wonderful ways. So then blogging tools show up and it becomes that much easier for someone to just start TALKING. Anyone can publish.

Then came business. Then came professional blogging, then came the books on HOW TO BLOG, and there are ways to blog in order to maximize your Google Adsense revenue, and hell you're just gonna grab the RSS feed anyway. And man oh man it got boring. And worst of all, it scared people away. Blogging, talking, writing on the web became something for professionals. Not something anybody could do at all.

So I've been playing with this thing called Vox, built by the fine people at Six Apart. It looks like a fine place to dive into writing online and deciding it's just for your friends to see and not worry about what you're saying too much. And to be honest, it feels a little messed up and a little chaotic and I get lost in it a bit. But it's FUN and it's filled with PEOPLE YOU KNOW. And I hope they never fix it up too much. Learning that 4th chord leads to a lot of trouble you don't need.

Written by Mike Monteiro on June 1, 2006 |