Six Apart launched Vox in 2006. I don’t think it ever lived up to 6A’s hopes for it to be “home, home, on the web” for a great many. I said so around Vox’s first anniversary. Anil Dash, who was 6A’s chief evangelist at the time, left a Vox-defending comment. At the time I felt that his comment seemed to arise out of duty, rather than out of the passion he often conveyed for 6A’s other offerings.
Now Vox is headed to what TechCrunch call the deadpool. I prefer the term amputation ward, since Vox is a limb, and 6A still has other limbs. That said, 6A went out on a limb in terms of the resources invested in Vox.
I hope that use of the term deadpool won’t soon be appropriate for 6A. It seems rather ominous that, of the social media blogs I subscribe to, only TechCrunch considered the amputation of Vox worth a post in itself. Mashable gave it a mention toward the bottom of a roundup post.
ReadWriteWeb, which used to run on 6A’s Movable Type (but now runs on WordPress) didn’t even mention the silencing of the Vox (or mentioned it so quietly that I didn’t hear). Anil, who left 6A a while ago, didn’t post about it either.
Even though I won’t miss Vox, I find its closing sad.