You may have heard of Ben and Mena Trott, if only because they've been mentioned on these pages before.

The young American husband-and-wife team created some weblogging software a few years ago.

What began as a simple hobby soon grew, and now their software is at the heart of a multi-million dollar global business with offices in Japan and Europe.

Ben and Mena have done well from weblogs. And now they're growing the business further.

It's called Vox (www.vox.com) and the idea is that it combines very simple weblogging with the very latest in "social software"; a term used to describe stuff on your computer (usually on the internet too) that lets you stay in touch with other people really easily.

First impressions of Vox are pretty good. It's rather similar to our old favourite, Flickr.

Where Flickr uses the concept of "Contacts" for people whose photos you want to keep an eye on, so Vox has a "Neighbourhood" of people whose writings and webloggings you wish to monitor.

As in LiveJournal, there's a single page that groups together all the new stuff from all your Neighbourhood friends, so it's easy to stay on top of the news (or gossip, whatever it may be).

Vox also takes a new approach with the kind of content it works with.

It's been built to accept not just words and pictures, but videos and audio snippets, even lists of books and DVDs from sites like Amazon.

At the moment, Vox is not open to everyone. You can browse around existing Vox sites, but if you want to start one of your own, you have to send them your email address and wait for an invitation.

It's interesting to look at the home page of Ben and Mena's company, Six Apart (www.sixapart.com) and see how the various products are differentiated.

In the old days (1999-2001, roughly speaking), weblogging software was just that, weblogging software. You either used it or you didn't.

Not anymore. The front of Six Apart's web site splits weblogging software into "Business and Professional Blogging" (for the Typepad and Moveable Type products) and "Personal Blogging" (for LiveJournal and the newcomer, Vox).

Before, people were either webloggers or they weren't. Now, there are 'shades' of weblogging to choose from.

Vox is already generating some positive reviews from the people who've managed to get invited into it early.

The main plus points appear to be the ease of use, and the instant community feel. While I was browsing, it felt oddly like all the people I know via Flickr had been magically imported into the Vox database; the conversations they were having sounded familiar.

There was a homely feel, before I'd even built a home page. That's probably a good sign.

Google keeps launching new stuff faster than we journalists can type them up.

The latest is Google Spreadsheets (spreadsheets.google.com), which looks and feels quite a lot like Microsoft Excel. Although with fewer features.

And it runs in your web browser. And it crashed mine!