Well, it's official. Vox was shut down, and Six Apart was sold to some outfit called VideoEgg. The combined company is now called Say Media. I'll comment on that later.
The shutdown of Vox happened in a rushed and not very organized manner. As Vox was attempting to be a social media destination rather than just a blogging service, people using Vox had made connections to each other. Unfortunately, the shutdown broke much of that, as the preferred migration path -- Typepad Micro -- lacked such features, and all other migration paths were manual jury-rigged export/import of data. Worse of all, most former sites on Vox were obliterated as of September 30th. Visit a site, you're likely to be redirected to this closure notice. People who opted to migrate to Typepad got a basic forward. Had I had any faith that my suggestion would be listened to, I would have suggested they have extended this option to everyone, no matter where they chose to host their blog, which they could configure and reconfigure at any time. (Who knows if Typepad will remain in service.) Many blogs could have been saved from loss thanks to that.
Worse than the blogs lost because they moved to new hosting are the ones that are lost forever, whose content was deleted thanks to the closing. Obviously hosting and bandwidth was the concern; otherwise, Six Apart/Say Media would have kept the archives up. Sadly, they never thought of enlisting anybody else -- perhaps the Internet Archive -- to hold the archives, like was done when Yahoo closed GeoCities. It's a shame Six Apart planned the dissolution of Vox so poorly.
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