Vox is a brand new blogging service from the good folks at SixApart, well known for other blogging products such as the bloggin community LiveJournal, and the blogging platforms MovableType, and TypePad. Vox makes blogging simple and fun, and is in many respects similar to a MySpace page (minus the horrendous coding). Sign up for a free account, and select one of 150 different themes for your blog. Next, you can set various privacy settings so you’re in complete control over who can view your blog posts and pictures. With all that set up, you’ll want to have your friends and family join Vox, or you can become part of one of many neighborhoods and make new friends. The key part here being the last, and with so many social sites of these sort popping up I wonder how successful Vox will be. Still, Vox is beautiful and is a great alternative to other bloated services of it’s kind.

Inquisitor is a superb Mac application which integrates into the Safari browser. If you’re an OS X user, chances are you know about Spotlight, the search as you type search system. Inquisitor works in much the same way but in your browser, so that as you type search queries into the Safari search box, you get possible results popping up immediately. While previous versions had to be bought, the latest version is completely free.

Showcase is one of those Firefox extensions which aren’t essential, but which add a little bit of eye candy and make the browser just a little bit more useful. If you have browsing habits like mine, then chances are that you keep at least 5, sometimes 10-20+, tabs open at once. Managing such a large number of tabs can be a little daunting, but not with Showcase.

As your site grows in popularity you are bound to face some downtime with your site, particularly if you end up getting dugg or slashdotted. Once your site reaches its bandwidth limit, users will start seeing error messages and may end up forgetting about your site and not coming now. There is a new service cleverly called L8ter which should help out. If you find a site that’s down, but that you’d like to come back to, simply head over to L8ter and enter the link of the site as well as your e-mail address. L8ter will then query the site until it comes back up, then inform you, via e-mail so you can go back to it and check it out. Additionally, L8ter offers a Firefox extension called Monitor with L8ter, so you can monitor a site right from your browser. Like all great things, it’s 100% free.

I lived in New York City for about twelve years, and still have family there so I head up there once in a while. While we don’t have subways where I live, they are an essential part of getting around New York, as anyone who has lived there can attest. If you’re a local, you may know the subway system by heart, but tourists have an extremely tough time finding their way around the tunnels sometimes. If you’ve ever been in that situation, then maybe you should download ZSubway, and load it onto your iPod.

As this site and many others can attest, the number of social bookmarking (social anything really) sites has grown exponentially over the past couple of years, and it can often be difficult to keep track of all the accounts you’ve created (unless you’re like me and you start canceling subscriptions left and right). Fortunately, there is a way to keep track of all those accounts with the somewhat humorously named Profilactic.

As more people buy mobile phones with video recording capabilities, and more site begin supporting video sharing, there is an increasing need for an application which makes posting video from your phone to your website extremely easy. YouTube does support such a feature but it can be a little cumbersome to use. Enter Veeker.

Cha-Ching is a wonderful money-management application for the Mac (don’t worry, it’s a universal binary so it’ll work on any Mac). The interface is done beautifully and definitely fits in with the look of OS X. ChaChing provides all the features you would expect from a money-management application including bill and account management, and thanks to the fact that the application supports the iCal standard, you can add your upcoming bills to your calendar so you’ll never get a late fee again. All events are (of course) categorized with tags you can add yourself, and if you want, you could even add images to each item.
Cha-Ching will run about $25, and is unfortunately available only for the Mac.