There’s the positives:

We found the process to be quick and simple, and the results to be attractive.

• We liked the privacy features.
• Vox does a nice job of jazzing up the world of blogging.
• No formatting or HTML code is necessary, a requirement that used to plague many blogging services.

And the negatives:

• Vox also doesn’t do a great job of implementing many features that are standard in blog services.
• Not everyone will want to register with Vox just to see your protected content.
• Vox’s weaknesses, the most important of which is clarifying its group labels.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Well, I should have been worrying about Amazon instead. They’ve shipped a bunch of stuff that I expected Google to do first (like S3, and now Unbox).

What’s the Unbox video store? Dave Taylor answers the question. Oh, and a few other people on TechMeme too.

If I didn’t have such a busy day today, I’d go play too. Here’s a recap:

8 a.m., breakfast with Francine Hardaway and Buzz Bruggeman.

10 a.m. interview with Mike Cannon-Brookes, founder and CEO of Atlassian (cool software company in Australia) along with Jon Silvers. You can see Mike on this video (not mine).

1:30 p.m. interviewed Jonathan Schwartz. That went very well, can’t wait to show you the video (my show probably will start the week of the 18th).

3 p.m. meeting with Ryanne and Jay, who are editing and encoding my show. They just got engaged, by the way, congrats!

5 p.m. Buzz and I head to David Hornick’s VC firm for a little shindig (nice Vox blog, are all the cool kids going to get those now? I have one too, but it’s lame so far. I am trying to get Maryam to switch to Vox, though). Met lots of famous geeks and entrepreneurs including Rick Smolan, the guy who did the “Day in the Life” series of photo books and Heidi Roizen (former executive at Apple, among other places). She told me she updated her own Wikipedia entry to correct some factual errors. It’ll be interesting to see if that’ll get her in trouble. Oh, I also met Ross Mayfield, founder of Social Text, who, in jest, told me a good business tip: “Pornotube is the future.”

8 p.m. Interview Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail. He’s in India and is planning out a new city. Now THAT isn’t something you hear every day.

9:30 p.m. Buzz picks me up and we head to Valerie Cunningham’s birthday party where I meet up with a bunch of PodTech’ers, including my boss, John Furrier, who tells me about working at Hewlett Packard and how much he loved that company. Said “it was the best company in the world.”

11 p.m. head home.

Midnight. Read blogs, email (72 still to be answered just from yesterday) and write this blog post.

Well, hope you all get some sleep. But it looks like half the Internet is playing with Amazon stuff right now.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

I used to ask this from people who make Newsreaders. Because simply somedays you are too busy to read everything, but you want to make sure you haven’t missed something big. That’s the real value I derive from TechMeme today. But what I really want find something that is big with my friends, which in the larger blogosphere is actually something small.

Today we have two new and seriously great kinds of attention tools. Newsreaders give us the ability to personally personalize. Combined with persistent query feeds, you can follow the people and things you know you want to read. Similarly, social networking services with a purpose let you aggregate the objects of your friends, be it pictures with Flickr, or posts with Vox. Tagging then lets you pivot for social discovery, but that is digging deeper than you often have time or interest for.

TechMeme and others show us mass popularization. Different communities help things bubble up. In Social Software, you first saw this with Blogdex and DayPop. What in the blogosophere has the most attention within a given time period. Now we have Digg, del.icio.us/popular, Reedit, Netscape, Technorati, YouTube, Dabble, Last.fm, Flickr Interestingness and a gazillion other increasingly rich examples. This is a Wisdom of Crowds we couldn’t gain before for discoverable knowledge.

As an aside, I wonder how original Slashdotters feel about Diggers’ favor for a popular answer rather than a leading question.

So more concisely, what I hope develops:

* Tools that let me personally personalize should give me just one more degree of interestingness and popularization.

* Tools of mass popularization should give me social popularization

Since Flickr has both kinds of attention tools, let me give specific suggestions for extension. For within My Contacts’s Photos, show me the most viewed, favorited and commented by my contacts. Then show me the most viewed, favorited and commented pictures by my contacts in Everyone’s Photos.

Now, this is just one user’s greedy suggestion, and there serious usability and algorithmic challenges to overcome. But what I’m getting at is part of the future of media.

The other night I watched the evening local news broadcast for the first time in a while. Its funny how local news attempts to localize national news. The idea is that if they show you a Mom in the Bay Area of a Soldier in Iraq, you can relate to that and it brings the story home. But unless the story originates from that Mom or Soldier, it is just an overlay with too much of a contextual shift. Similarly, when an item of local news is made national — it is too shallow for our local tastes and we are attracted to it simply because or fair city is made popular.

I empathize with the expert editors behind these mass media and their attempts to connect the interesting for me, when me is lost in a demographic. But I’ve had a taste of going direct. When I carry the burden of discovery, and float around YouTube’s popular and related clips, I can compose a broadcast for myself. The outstanding political commentary, funny stuff and best soccer highlights from around the world.

But after a long day of work, I’m tired, and want the network to work for me. Cue up not what is popular, or what the people I subscribed to produced. Cue up what my social network has found interesting. At any given time it may be local, national, international, topical or mundane. Of course, in the process of actively consuming it, I’ll leave behind breadcrumbs of attention to make it better for my friends.

UPDATE: I’ve been ranting about this for years. Sam Ruby hacked together a nifty MeMeme and the result shows a clear and simple foci of attention (a post by Spoksky at last glance), FeedDemon has something in the works and Tailrank has something close.

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

The concept of the “Smart” Social Network dawned on me after I learned about Multiply. At that point, I already knew about Vox and previously wrote about imbee, so I decided to write a post on what I thought was a “Smart” Social Network. My recent piece at Read/Write Web is the result.

Essentially, a Smart Social Network brings intelligence into the network. It provides a way to define and describe virtual relationships – it gives users more control.

Richard actually added some valuable thoughts to this one, particularly in the conclusion. I hope you will take a peak – Smart Social Networks:

But what if there was a way to put access controls around your personal details, so that only people you trust can see it? There’s a new type of SNS arising that enables exactly that.

“Smart” Social Networks – A Better Way to Connect

Smart social networks are bringing intelligence into the network. Similar to the real world, they are helping users describe their online relationships. Let’s take a look at some of today’s evolving “smart” social networks: Facebook, imbee, Vox, and Mulitply.

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Ken Yarmosh is a consultant who helps organizations get the most out of their technology investments. He works with technology users and creators across various industries, focusing on technology education and strategy. With over 7 years IT experience, Ken has worked with small businesses, non-profits, federal agencies, and multi-million dollar companies.

His online efforts include acting as the Editor for the Corante Technology Hub and authoring the TECHNOSIGHT blog.

CLRB Hanson Industries, dba Industrial Printing, and legendary talk show host Howard Stern have filed suit against Google, according to Marketing Vox News. Mr. Stern, whose show will begin to broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio in January, is not known to be in a business relationship with Industrial Printing at this time.

The suit focuses on Google’s AdWords program, and contends the search engine giant overcharges users when their daily budget is exceeded. Google is supposed to refund charges in excess of 120 percent of a customer’s daily budget.

The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, alleges Google charges customers well above that figure. Google’s policy states that it will refund customers who get charged beyond the 120 percent limit. In the suit, one plaintiff alleges charges of as much as 162 percent of their daily budget.

Google “continues to bill plaintiffs and all other members of the class in excess of the daily budgets,” according to the article. Lawyers for the plaintiffs filed the suit in Google’s backyard, at Santa Clara Superior Court in California.

Love Google AdWords? Had your own issues with daily budgets? Discuss this topic in WebProWorld.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Discuss Partying with Garrett at WebProWorld.

Drunk Garrett: Via MarketingVox…

They had beer with Tribal Fusion labels (tasty).

I finally got to meet Tig Tillinghast, whose articles I’ve read (well, ok, sometimes I skim) since I started working online. He’s writing for Marketing Vox now, which is fine blog.

I didn’t recognize him at first because he’s shaved off his beard.

Pamela Parker of ClickZ introduced herself too – again it was nice to put a hand shake and a voice to the people I’ve been reading for so long.

I also grabbed one of the Comission Junction train whistles. It’s wooden and makes a nice toot when you blow it. I had to work for it though – I talked with Kerri Pollard and tried to understand what exactly they do (sell ads, right?). I struggle some when I’m outside the comfortable confines of SEO. And when I’ve had a few beers.

Party number two awaited upstairs at the close of the reception hall, and so I walked up with Tig and one of his fellow bloggers. Upstairs I met Troy Perkins, President of Vocal Minds. They own Pay Per Click Analyst, a company and article resource for PPC buyers.

We had another couple beers while listening to the three piece jazz band. It was loud and got louder when I met up with Barbara Coll, better known as Web Mama. And I can say that’s when my trouble really started (just kidding – hi Barbara!).

She introduced me to the suave, debonair, and uber connected Joeseph Morin of boostranking.com. He was talking on his cell phone every five minutes and making jokes in between. He and Barbara are what I consider to be party drivers – they’re boisterous, fun, and are always ready to move on to the next event.

In other words, perfect people to hang out with at Ad:Tech.

With the addition of Lucas Morea of Latin Edge we made our way to the lobby and waited. Because Joe had to go to his room for a minute.

While sitting in the atrium I both lost my cell phone – my boss’s BMW cell phone he got when he got his BMW – and spoke with Rob Friedman of digital envoy, one of the companies suing Google.

I got his card, but didn’t get much of a scoop from him on how the law suit is going. I will.

So Joe finally got downstairs and we marched over to the W, a San Francisco hotel where Go Toast was hosting a party. Well, actually it was Atlas. Go Toast changed their name. I ate calimari and drank no more beer – at this point I was, as we say in Kentucky, lit up. Which explains, I like to believe, why I lost my cell phone.

From the Atlas party we bopped over to the business.com party over at the Thirsty Bear (after Troy and I popped into the Double Click party). Well, we rode in the limo, which Joe had arranged – he has friends in New York – even though the bar was only just across the street. Debauchery I tell you!

I ate a plate full of rice at the Thirsty Bear to put something besides beer in my belly. The party there had started to wind down though and we were all ready to head over to the Suede, where Tribal Fusion was hosting the Ad:Tech after party.

Joe called his limo buddy, and Web Mama took half the crew off to eat. I got impatient and jumped in the trafficbuyer.com stretch hummer limo, hoping to make a quick trip to what I thought would be the main event.

The limo was an interesting ride. First of all it was a hummer, and I’ve never ridden in a hummer before, much less a stretch limo hummer. It was a little flashy for my taste and cramped once we had filled it up with other revelers.

So why did TrafficBuyer drive us around? So they could talk about their products. Pretty interesting idea too. The ride to the Suede took a little longer than it should have, which led me to believe the driver had been instructed to cruise some.

I got to talking some with a fellow by the name of Ari Paparo of Control K. He’s a blogger too, and finished the New York Marathon in 6 hours. Yes, that’s about 4 and a quarter blistering miles an hour. (Ok Ok, he DID go for 26 miles and that’s impressive.)

On the ride I also met an SEO by the name of Garry Grant, a big booming-voice kind of guy who hustled us through the line at the Suede with a hundred dollar bill.

The Suede: pseudo-swanky, smokey seeming without there being any cigarette smoke and packed with marketers. Ari was kind enough to get me a water (yes, after my comments to him about his turtle’s pace in the marathon) and I stood and watched the hired girls twirl light sticks and lighted hula hoops in time to the slamming techno music.

Chris Eaves of cogbox tried to get me to drink one of his vodka and tonics – he’d gotten two and wanted to pass one off. I wasn’t having it though – even though it was only 12 in San Francisco it was 3am in Kentucky time.

So I left, still not knowing what it is that Tribal Fusion does. I did get my phone back though, after an anxious call to the trafficbuyers to see if I’d dropped in their limo. No – it was here at the Palace, and I gave a hefty tip to the attendant who returned it to me.

Lesson: bring as little as possible with you when partying at Ad:Tech… six parties may induce the loss of personal belongings.

Garrett French is the editor of iEntry’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.