After all, ’tis the season for giving, and we have something that everyone can celebrate! Here’s what’s in our bag of goodies:

Public Groups
More than 25% of you are members of at least one of the hundreds of Mixx Private Groups that have been created. Now when you create a group, you can opt to have it accessible to the entire Mixx community. “But why?” you ask, and that’s the sort of excellent question we’ve come to expect from such an exceedingly intelligent and attractive community. So here’s why this is such a cool new feature:

• Mixx Public groups are a great tool for specific topics such as a favorite sports team, PTA group, interest group or other organization. They’re also ideal for some small businesses, trade groups, grass roots organizations, etc.
• Public Groups offer a more social experience: In addition to commenting on particular stories in the usual way, Mixxers will also be able to carry on a conversation on the “Soapbox” outside of the comment areas you’re already used to.
• Each Public Group will have a leader board with daily awards for both the Top Submitter and the Thought Leader in that group.
• Want to cozy up with other group members (and no, we don’t mean in an “I’m looking for a date” kind of way)? Just browse other Mixxers’ profiles using their avatars.
• We’ve created additional tools for the group administrator—including the ability to set a welcome message and create rules for that particular group. (Please note that this will in no way change or replace the Mixx Terms of Use)
• The group administrator retains control over just how public the group is: Can a non-group member see everything that goes on in the group? Or will you share only the group description? Or just the headlines for all submitted content? Of course, you’ll still get to decide whether it’s invite-only or if any Mixxer can join.
• Other Mixxers will also be able to search for public groups (but NOT private ones) and we’ll list the most active public groups on the Mixx main page and everyone’s YourMixx pages.

Limited time offer for existing groups! If you currently have a private group that you want to move out to the public realm, drop us a line at groups@mixx.com. Just make sure all the admins agree to move it public. Otherwise it might be like the time your friend “accidentally” showed your fiancée a videotape of your bachelor party—not cool. Just send us that note in the next couple of weeks.

What, you want more? Well, in the spirit of the season:

Email Digests
It’s here! You asked and we’ve been working overtime to get you the once-a-day update of all activity on Mixx—who Friended you, any comments on your submissions, group activity, and whatever else has been clogging up your in-box.

Address Book Importer
Want an easier way to invite your friends to join you in a group on Mixx? Use our new Address Book Importer, which works with the four largest email providers. Just type in your email address, with the domain name, and we’ll get them lined up for an invite to your group!

On-deck
Are you one of those people who must, must find the good stuff before anyone else does? We are, so we’re introducing this cool new feature that will let you see the content that is close to crossing into the Popular category. These stories will be nicely lined up under the “Recent” tab. To go along with this, you’ll also be able to see how long ago a particular item became popular. Alas, we still can’t tell you why people vote the way they do. If we could we’d be much more popular in political circles.

Duplicates
We’ve ramped up the duplicate checker to catch more duplicates. This should relieve some work for the duplicate Neighborhood Watch who have been diligently reporting those cases where our duplicate check was falling down on the job. And while we’re very thankful for their hard work–it shouldn’t have to be the job of the community to do what our computers should be doing!

As always with our new stuff, we’d love to hear what you think. Just drop a line to feedback.

That should be enough to keep you busy for a while, but we’ll be back in January with more treats. So however and wherever you’re celebrating the New Year, make it happy and safe, and know that we’re thinking of you!

The Mixx Team

Check under “Tech” this afternoon and you’ll notice something new: two categories that weren’t there before! Introducing Microsoft and Software. Many Mixxers had requested, so we obliged.

Remember that you can add anything to YourMixx. Add a tag, a category, a group or a person. It’s your choice. Just point your browser to http://www.mixx.com/tags/[insert tag name here] and click “Add to Your Mixx”.

The political primaries may be a month or so off, but there’s another race that commands your attention (and your votes)! The fine folk at Mashable have posted nominees for the Open Web Awards. Of particular interest is the Social News & Bookmarking category of which Mixx is a nominee. We couldn’t be happier to be on the list among such great services.

Now we need your help. The top three sites in each category make it to the second round of judging. Polls are open until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 16th. You have until then to cast your vote for your favorite social news & bookmarking site. Of course, we can’t tell you who to vote for, but we will tell you all of us at Mixx would appreciate your vote.

Did you know you could search Mixx from your browser’s Search Bar? (If you’re using Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox, that is.) Odds are you didn’t, because we’ve been very lazy about pointing this feature out!

While you’re browsing Mixx, look up to your browser’s Search Bar (usually in the top right) and you’ll notice it’s highlighted. Give the down arrow a click and you’ll be presented with your list of installed Search Providers. Depending on your browser, you’ll either see “Add Mixx” or the “Add Search Providers” option. Either way, click through and you’ll have a Mixx search added to your Search Bar! Easy as that.

I posted a couple of screenshots (here and here) over on Flickr to walk you through the process in Internet Explorer 7:

Special thanks to Brian for his post over on the MixxingBowl blog that got me organized to write this up.

- Jason

Many of you have seen that we recently partnered with the LA Times. As they demonstrated with their recent coverage of the CA wildfires, their reporting is second-to-none, so we’re excited to have such a great content partner join us in the Mixx.

We’ve had a few questions about the partnership, particularly with one sentence that was in the press release. That sentence in question included: “cross-promotional traffic will be maximized by optimization of Times content for searches from within the Mixx site.”

Understandably—but incorrectly—some have interpreted this to mean that we will somehow change our search algorithm or results to favor LATimes articles and that LATimes content will be booted to the top of the “popular” stories. Both of these conclusions are incorrect.

To put an end to the rumors, I would like to remind to everyone that Mixxers have always determined what becomes popular on Mixx: one-person-one-vote.

If the content submitted doesn’t resonate with the Mixx community, it will go nowhere—even if it is from one of our strategic partners. We choose our partners because of their overall outstanding content, but we don’t expect you to vote for something simply because we signed an agreement. And I can assure you that LATimes doesn’t expect every story they publish to resonate with such a diverse group of people.

And about that “optimized for search.” Everyone who submits something to the Mixx can optimize their content for our search, which is very simple and works within the following fields:

• Tags
• Titles
• Descriptions
• Comments

In short, these are the only things we host on our servers. So if you fill out those fields completely, your submissions are optimized.

The LATimes has coded the Mixx buttons on their site to pre-populate titles, description and tag fields. This is the only way they are “optimizing” the content. Beyond this, nothing is done to handle those submissions any differently than any other submission from any other source.

Let’s look at a concrete example.

Suppose you are submitting in a picture of a very cute kitten sitting on a couch. If you submit the title “Very Cute” and the description as “awwww” then its going to be awfully hard for anyone to find that great picture in search if they are looking for pictures of kittens.

If, however, you title the submission “Very Cute Kitten” and the description “Picture of a very cute cat sitting on a couch” and add the tags “cat“, “kitten“, “couch“, and “cute“, you can see that it will be much much easier for someone to find if they search on “kitten” or “cat” (or even “couch”). By adding a title, a good description–one that really summarizes the content—and lots of tags to reflect the content, you are “optimizing” your submission for search. (Just don’t spam into every category and/or tag, because that’s a violation of our Terms of Use.)

I hope this clears things up, and as always, if you ever have questions about the way things work, please feel free to ask!

-Chris McGill