My absolutely favorite feature of Vox 0.8 (the release you're currently on as of July 7) is the iStockphoto integration. I'm proud to say that I initiated our involvement with iStockphoto based on my experiences as a member. A couple years ago I uploaded about six photos that over the course of time has made me about $100 in credits. That may not seem like a lot, but it's allowed me to download more photos for my use, as well as user on our products. They really have a great service that was a really early innovator of user-generated content for commercial and personal purposes. They're owned by Getty now, but that didn't make working with them a pain -- the team there is great.
Anyway, the reason why I wanted to get them into Vox as a conduit is because it's so great to be able to add a photo or illustration to a post. My mom, for example, doesn't have a ton of photos on her computer and she certainly doesn't have the time or interest to search Google Images. But then she'll ask me how to make her posts look better. And its not just her -- there are times I just don't have the right picture. If I'm writing about sushi, for example, I don't need the photo to be mine -- I'd be happy just to insert a representative picture.
A little trick to get some great images from iStockphoto -- when you search, add "illustration" as a tag. This will return mostly illustrations which are often the best looking images for posts. The other neat thing is that we pull all the tags that have already been applied to the image -- just like we do with our other conduits that offer tagging.
One bug we just caught was that if you insert a "large" image, it won't display. Try medium and it will work. This will be fixed in the next push.
I hope this integration encourages our users to get iStockphoto accounts. And, vice versa. I think artists on iStockphoto would be great bloggers showing off their work.
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