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Get into The Mixx
By Michael Lundberg | November 4, 2007
If you’re a habitual internet user like I am, then you’re probably familiar with the popular site, Digg.com. If you’re not, it’s a simple concept to understand - users login to the site and submit interesting article links and websites, along with a short description of what the article is about and the appropriate tags. Other Digg users can vote for submitted articles which raises their prominence. If you disagree and think an article is bogus, you can vote it down, which lowers it’s prominence. Most blog publishers put a Digg button at the bottom of their articles to help automate the Digg submission process and entice readers to submit and vote on their articles. Obviously, Digg can be a powerful tool for building buzz about your website.
Digg is generally perceived as a good thing (TM), but there are some complaints about it. One of the most prominent complaints is the amount of spam and junk news that can be found on Digg. There are tools within Digg to help prevent this, but the shear number of users means that the spam will continue to propagate.
Like I mentioned, it’s a simple concept and it works. There are several variants to Digg such as StumbleUpon, Newsvine, Furl, and Reddit to name a few. Well, there’s a new player in town and it’s called, The Mixx. Right now, Mixx offers all of the rudimentary Digg-like functions, including submitting stories (videos and pictures, too!) and voting on stories (up or down). You can create a private Mixx group and invite users to the group so that you can share content with like-minded users. I created a group, so if you want to join it, just leave me a comment below. Another cool feature of Mixx is that you can create your own personal page, listing content from the major Mixx categories. The content on this page can be reordered using drag and drop functionality.
If found it to be relatively simple to submit stories via the Mixx site, but they do offer some tools (found here) to make the process even easier, like a Firefox and IE submission bookmarklet.
The biggest thing that I’d like to see added to Mixx is an integration blog feature. I’ve used the Digg integrated blog feature a couple of times before. It makes it really easy to blog about a Digg story on your own site and it would be great if Mixx had this as well.
There’s no private invite to get for Mixx, so just head over to the site and get yourself an account. And tell ‘em Michael sent you. After you’ve got an account, leave me a note and I’ll get you added to my Mixx group.
Update: I forgot to post my Mixx link: http://www.mixx.com/users/mwlundberg
