Think About The Children!

Ask MetaFilter is a great question-and-answer site, and recently a member of the site posed a fairly common inquiry:

My wife and I are expecting our first child soon, and I've been looking for a site that would allow us to post photographs, videoclips, maybe a journal/blog, etc., and then allow family members/friends to log-in and view them. Has anyone used such a site they'd recommend strongly?

... Ideally, I'd like to find a site that focuses on simplicity - just the few functions I really need - and an elegant, minimalist design, and usable enough that even my grandparents could find their way thru it.

To our delight, the Vox community was there to tell the story of the site. and the recommendations were almost universal: This is a perfect way to use Vox. (We're also happy that LiveJournal got some mentions to -- there are tons of parents happily sharing their stories on LiveJournal.)

But regardless of which tool people use, we're just happy to see so much respect and attention paid to the idea of blogging privately to one's friends and family. It's not the most obvious thing in the world, if all you've heard about is big name bloggers writing for thousands of readers.

Private family blogging seems to be catching on, though -- as the Team Vox blog has been documenting, we've seen stories about this kind of community in publications ranging from the New York Times (which we mentioned before) to a story in Wired today. Who knows, maybe with enough publicity for the idea, someday everybody will know that there's an easy way to share those oh-so-cute baby pictures without having to worry about the whole web seeing them.