Vox is the newest blogging site from Six Apart, the company that owns Type Pad and Live Journal. I’ve been a loyal Live Journal user since July of 2002. I know all the ins and outs of the site, and I don’t really have any problems with it. However, Vox looked like a cross between Live Journal and All Consuming, so I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s how the two sites measure up…

Accessibility:
To create a new Vox account, you either need to submit your e-mail address and wait for a code, or get a code from a friend. It’s kind of a pain. (However, once you join, you get five activation codes to give to friends.)
Live Journal used to use activation codes as well, but they gave it up some time ago. Now, you can set up a free account immediately.

Unless you have a Vox account, you can’t post comments to peoples’ entries or photos.
Live Journal supports Open ID, which allows you to post a comment to anyone’s blog using your personal blogging URL, as long as your site also supports Open ID. (More information on Open ID can be found here

Site Navigation:
Vox has six options on their navigation bar. The front page looks very sleek and is incredibly easy to navigate.
Live Journal has seven options on their navigation bar. However, all of them have drop-down menus, giving you a sum total of 45 options to choose from. To be fair, Live Journal does have more features than Vox, but it’s still a little overwhelming.

Search Feature:
Vox allows you to search for journals using an e-mail address or common interest. They also allow searches by first and last name, so people who know your name can easily find your blog. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is pretty much up to you. Personally, I’m kind of iffy about it. There’s a long list of people who know my name – bosses, parents, teachers, ex-boyfriends – and I’m not sure I want all of them reading my blog.
Live Journal also allows searches using an e-mail address or common interest, but there is no name search. You can also find users by geographic location or what schools they’ve attended. (Assuming they’ve opted to list that information in their profile.) There’s also a random search that takes you to a blog, well…randomly.

Privacy:
Vox has very easy privacy controls. You can set pictures and entries to be viewable by everyone, people you’ve added as friends, or only yourself.
Live Journal has the same basic privacy groups, but you also have the option of setting up custom privacy groups. To use a rather tacky example, let’s say you and your significant other both have journals, you’re friends, and you recently got into a fight. If you make a post venting about the fight and you set it to friends-only, your significant other would be able to see it. With LJ, you have the option of setting up a separate privacy group and selecting who goes in it. In this case, you could make the post only visible to online friends, or everyone but your significant other, or everyone except mutual friends. You have a lot more control over who sees what.

Journal Styles:
Vox has a huge selection of ready-to-use styles with really great graphics. It’s also easy to pick a style or change from one style to another, which is great for beginners.
Live Journal has a lot of layouts to choose from, although not nearly as many as Vox. Each layout has a color theme, and very few layouts have graphics. However, you can tweak the style settings. You can change the text of comment links, add a background image, change your font, and much more. This is great for advanced users who want more control over the appearance of their blog.

Features:
Probably the biggest draw for Vox is its ability to incorporate media into blog posts. It works with your existing Flickr or Photobucket account, in addition to having its own photo hosting. You can also add videos from You Tube and Google Videos, and books and movies from Amazon. Another nice feature is the ability to post entries from your mobile phone or e-mail address.
Live Journal isn’t as media friendly. Like Vox, you can add videos from You Tube and Google. They do have photo hosting, but only for paid users. (About $20 for a year, which is comparable to a Flickr account.) Ditto posting by a mobile phone – it’s not available for free users. With your paid account, you also get the option to make phone posts – you call a local number and record your update, which is then posted to your journal as an audio file. Another feature for paid users is an extra number of userpics, which are basically avatars. You can post your entries and comments with whatever userpic you feel is appropriate, which is a feature I really wish Vox had.

Another big thing Vox seems to be lacking is communities, which is a huge drawback for me.
With Live Journal, there are communities that users can join and post to. It’s one of the greatest ways to interact with people who share your common interest. For example, there’s a Project Runway community that I’m part of. Every week, during the show, there’s a discussion post where everyone in the community can post their reactions to what’s going on as they’re watching. Whatever interest you have, I can almost guarantee you there’s a community dedicated to it.

Overall:
Vox is great for you if you want a basic blogging site that’s user friendly. It has really great features, and the entire site is very intuitive, making it incredibly easy to use, even for people who’ve never blogged before.
If you’re a more advanced user and you want to be able to customize everything until it’s the exact way you want it, Live Journal is more suited to your needs. It’s also very user-friendly, but because of the amount of features it has, it’s harder to learn to use.

Overall, I really like Vox, but there are definitely some tradeoffs. I still have a lot of friends on Live Journal, so I don’t really want to give it up. I’ll probably just end up keeping both accounts…