The first four (well more than that now) Sifter campaigns are on the books and closed out, and as promised, we are giving away another MacBook. In case you have forgotten, we gave away a MacBook to Tau_Zero about six weeks ago (you can read all about it here), and we are holding true to our promise to give another one away.

Drum roll please……………………. and the winner of our second MacBook give away is: Suzanek! Congrats to Suzanek, she (like a lot of other Mixxers) took the time out of their busy Mixxing schedule to check out the first four Sifter campaigns and voted on which ones she liked. It is Mixxers like Suzanek and the rest of you that make our wonderful site go around, and sometimes we need to show our gratitude a little more than just with Karma, and so we did.

Will we be giving away another one? Perhaps, but you will have to keep any eye out every week for the Sifter to see if we give away any hints as to when the next give away may be. Remember, your participation in the Sifter gives you a say in what runs on the front page of Mixx and keeps the site nice and clean for our users! As always, every week there is a random drawing for a cool give away (to someone who participated in the Sifter that week, of course).

Again, thanks to everyone who participated, keep up the great work!

Cheers,
The Mixx Team

Get a job!!

“We didn’t all get into music for a job! We got into music to avoid a job, in truth - and get lots of girls.”
View quotes by Paul McCartney

“To a member of the audience who was heckling - ‘Don’t tell me how to do my job, do I go to your job and tell you how to sweep up”
View quotes by Billy Connelly

“It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.”
View quotes by Muhammad Ali

And the winner of the VisualCV.com Sifter is…. http://www.visualcv.com/donfarnsworth !  Check this guy out, he could pretty much sell ice in the Arctic Circle.  He has demos, sales collateral, case studies, brochures, research and his website all on his visual CV.  He pretty much “brings home the bacon and fries it up in a pan”.  Get over there and trick out your own VisualCV.

Summer Reading Sifter

The Sifter this week features beach reading……. Tell us which of these will be on your reading list this summer (and if you have read it, leave a review).   http://www.mixx.com/sifter

Your participation on the Sifter gives you a say in what runs on the front page of Mixx and keeps the site nice and clean for our users!

Now Go Get Your Mixx on!
Chris

Ps.

iTunes winner:  Congratulations to this week’s $25 iTunes gift certificate winner is homestar 14!

Pps.

We’ll announce the MacBook winner later this week so stay tuned!

“Kyle Reese: The Terminator’s an infiltration unit, part man, part machine. Underneath, it’s a hyper-alloy combat chassis - micro processor-controlled, fully armored. Very tough. But outside, it’s living human tissue - flesh, skin, hair, blood, grown for the cyborgs…The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy. But these are new, they look human. Sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. I had to wait till he moved on you before I could zero him.”
To be honest, this description fits many of the SuperMixxers we know!
Yes Terminator fans went crazy for this week’s Sifter… the T4 posters.  Not shockingly, the crowd was overwhelmingly male this week and you all picked the bad-ass red eye picture… but wait, were they not all bad ass?!  T4 opens this Friday and we all expect much talk on Mixx over the weekend.

New Sifter is Open
This week’s Sifter is being brought to you by VisualCV.com.  If you have never heard of them, they have been covered in just about every medium possible as one of the coolest new ways to show off who you really are and what you are about in a resume.  You get to show off charts, videos, images, art work and more…… and since jobs are a little short right now, every edge you can get in order to stand out from the competition is crucial.  The Sifter has some examples of really cool CV’s, so get in there and check them out!  In fact, the VisualCV team has agreed to review resumes the Mixxers make this week and if they are cool enough they will be listed on their examples page where a lot of recruiters “take stock”.  Just send a link of your VisualCV to katrina@visualcv.com and tell her you are a Mixxer.  You’d be in some pretty cool company there including Barack Obama and Robert Scobble.

Remember, you must vote in each of the first four sifters to be eligible to win a Mac Book.
Also, please remember that your participation on the Sifter gives you a say in what runs on the front page of Mixx and keeps the site nice and clean for our users!

Now Go Get Your Mixx on!  Click here to go to The Sifter.

Chris

The second running of the Sifter has come to a close, and winner winner chicken dinner; the top creative this week was the Clorox(r) Toaster creative. Once again, the competition was tight; but it looks as if the Toaster creative took the lead at the end and held onto it until the finish line. The creatives are from Clorox’s national print advertising campaign in support of the Clorox Disinfecting Wipes Décor canisters, more information can be found at www.redesignclean.com. Thanks to everyone who participated this week and making it an overwhelming success.

Also, congratulation to version7.7 who won this week’s $25 iTunes card!

New Sifter Open
The new Sifter is out! We thought we would change things up a bit this week and feature a sure to be summer blockbuster movie, Terminator Salvation; and it’s various movie posters for you to pick your favorite. Take a minute to go into the sifter, check them out and rank order them. Remember, you must vote in each of the first four sifters to be eligible to win you Mac Book.

Also, please remember that your participation on The Sifter gives you a say in what runs on the front page of Mixx and keeps the site nice and clean for our users!

Now go get your Mixx on!

Because we love, love our Mixxers and the fantastic community they’ve helped us create, we decided that it was time to give a little something back to our most loyal users.

So without further ado, we bring you the Loyal Mixxer Sweepstakes!

Want to know what you’re playing for? The Grand Prize (well, the only prize—we are just a little startup, after all)? A super-cool Mixx t-shirt or hat? Nope, not this time. How about a brand-spankin’ new Apple MacBook?

No—your eyes are not playing tricks on you: a new Apple MacBook! (Yeah, we can’t believe we are giving this away either; we wanted to keep it for ourselves, but Chris found out and put us all in time out). And unlike some other give-aways, this isn’t a one-in-a-gazillion chance. This sweepstakes is only open to those Mixxers who achieve Power Mixxer status—so your odds are much better than playing in that local lottery!

To be eligible for this awesome sweepstakes, you must be not just a Mixxer (though we do love you, too); you must be a Loyal Mixxer. “But how am I to know if I’m truly a loyal Mixxer?” you ask. Excellent question, grasshopper! To qualify, you must have been Mixxing with us for long enough to have achieved 500 Karma points. If you’re not sure if you qualify, check your Karma points or visit the Entry Page.

And entering the Loyal Mixxer Sweepstakes is literally as easy as 1,2,3 and will take less time than you’ll spend reading this post. All you have to do is go to www.mixx.com/sweepstakes/join, provide us some general information (to prove that you’re human), read and agree to the Sweepstakes rules and regulations, hit Submit and—presto!—you’re done!

The Fine Print
This should probably be in teeny, tiny little type but we work a lot and six-point type hurts our eyes. It’s also harder for you to read, so: The Sweepstakes will begin on March 18th, 2009 at 6:00 a.m. EST and end on March 27th, 2009 at 11:59 a.m. EST. We’ll announce the winner no later than April 15, 2009. Any entries submitted prior to the start date or after the end date will not be accepted.

But Wait! There’s More!
If you’re eligible for the Loyal Mixxer Sweepstakes, you’re also eligible to become a PowerMixxer, which offers more ways for you to contribute to the Mixx community: You’ll be authorized to hand out more kudos; you’ll have the ability to relate items; you’ll get a special badge for your profile, as well as a few other goodies down the road.

You don’t need to do anything to get your PowerMixxer designation. We’ll put you on the list for those powers when you register for the Sweepstakes, and then they’ll be active a short time after the Sweepstakes is over. We’ll let you know the exact timing in a later post.

We know that you’re probably in a hurry to try to get your hands on that MacBook, but before you rush off to register for the Sweepstakes, we have a little more for you!

Spam, Spam, Glorious Spam—I do not like it, Sam I Am*
With the economy down in the dumps, a lot of people are eating more SPAM.  While Hormel brings the people ever more SPAM, we’re trying to make sure there’s a less spam in the Mixx. While we accept that spam, happens, we’ve come up with a few more tools to help get rid of it. To date, we’ve launched a suite of spam fighting tools, some that you can see, as well as a few that only we can see. We’ve already made it easy to personalize YourMixx so that you only get the Mixx content that is relevant to you. You can form public and private groups and communities—lots of them! And you’re able and encouraged to report spam whenever you see it.

Despite the best efforts of everyone in the Mixx community and here at HQ, determined spammers still manage to squeak through, hiding themselves in the dark recesses of Mixx. As of this morning, however, we’ve taken another of those places away. Joe has designed a nifty spam-fighting tool that uses some top-secret AI (of course, we can’t tell you or we’d have to kill you) to determine the likelihood of a submission being considered spam by the general Mixx community. If a submission looks good, we’ll promote it into the Recent bucket on the Popular Page. If it looks a little fishy, it will get tossed into the Unfiltered bucket.  The outright bad stuff just continues to be disallowed from the get-go. Its not going to be bullet-proof right out of the gate, but we’ve got some buttons and knobs and fancy sliders we can use to help tune it as we go.

By default, everyone will see the Filtered bucket, but you can flip back and forth from Filtered/Recent to Unfiltered/Everything right there on the Recent page. This switch is for those of you who like to go wading through the suspicious stuff in search of the hidden gem.  If that’s not really your thing, then you’ll see only the best of what your fellow Mixxers have to offer.

At the request of some of our more avid Spam Fighters, we’ve added a feedback loop to our spam reporting. This means that, if you like, we’ll update you via MixxMail with the resolution of any abuse report you submit, whether it’s for a story, photo or video. Also, when you report a submission as spam, we’ll indicate that right there on the All Voters page.

As always, we love Feedback, so please let us know what you think!

Love,
Your Mixx Team

*Our most humble apologies to Dr. Seuss

UPDATE:  In response to a FAQ:  SuperMixxers are eligible for the sweepstakes as well, of course.