Vox, a Six Apart blogging community I admittedly am enjoying more and more each day, has just launched a few major new features, the most notable of which is Groups. Vox members can now create public or private groups for sharing anything you can already publish on Vox: posts, pictures, videos, books and more. Group owners can allows others to admin the group, and members can post either directly to the group or by clicking a button on content from their own Vox blog. I went through groups and added myself to a few before penning this post, and I can say that Vox thought this new feature through pretty well during development.


Below each post composition window now is an 'add to group' button, making it easy to publish content simultaneously to your own blog and any relevant groups. A minor gripe, however, is that they don't employ check boxes here; you can only click on one group at a time, though I don't imagine the greater majority will be adding too much content to more than one group at a time.


Also above all posts and other content on your blog (when you're signed in, of course) is a new 'add to group' button, keeping Organize panel (the admin area) visits to a minimum.

The other big feature in this new release is the much-requested ability to create custom banners for your Vox. A post on their new design.vox.com blog specifically designed to help users build the beest banner(s) they can has all the details, but basically: you can create a banner up to 940px x 200px in size, while anything smaller gets aligned to the bottom right. If this feature gets your creative juices flowing though, definitely check out the new Vox Design blog for all the info you need.

So far I love this new feature, though I must also curse Vox in the same breath for making such a cool community even cooler. Vox has been described as 'MySpace for the literate,' and I tend to agree. Pretty soon I'll be furiously refreshing my home page every chance I get, anticipating every new comment and message from readers and my Neighborhood. Thanks a lot, Vox.