If you're starting your own blog, there's no question that WordPress is one of the most customizable, powerful blogging platforms around. But Google's blogger is attractive because it doesn't require a hosting solution, and it's ridiculously easy to use.

On the other hand, there are hundreds of plugins for WordPress that just don't work with Blogger. That's starting to change, and it's not necessarily because Google is rolling out support for new features. No, it's because developers are moving away from hosted scripts and offering up javascript based applications.

ShareThis is a popular WordPress plugin that puts a little "share this" icon near every post on your blog. Click it and you get the option to email the post to your friends or submit it to several popular social bookmarking sites..

Up until recently, you could only install ShareThis on WordPress blogs. But now the company has released ShareThis 2.0, which is a javascript version that works with Blogger as well. Well, almost works. Right now there's an error that prevents ShareThis from showing up on more than one post per page. But the team is working to fix that problem.

ShareThis 2.0 loads slower than ShareThis 1.0, but because of the redesign, you can track how people are using your ShareThis icons. If you'd rather install the old version of the plugin, it's still available.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Six Apart's community-focused Vox blogging service has been making a number of incremental improvements over the last month or two with minor updates to their software. New themes and other enhancements are all welcome additions, but two specific new features turned out heads enough for a mention.

First: the new Vox This bookmarklet. While Vox has been arguably way ahead of the competition by offering the best and most polished tools for blogging items from YouTube, Flickr and Amazon, they've never had a tool like Blogger's Blog This button that allows their users to easily blog things from virtually any site on the web. Finally, Vox This bridges this gap by offering a powerful bookmarklet users can click to instantly blog any site they're looking at, complete with the ability to scrape any selected text and even pictures on the page. The announcement post for this new feature also hints at an upcoming 'links library' feature for Vox, which sounds like it might add a simple linkroll functionality to Vox blogs that is powered by this bookmarklet.

The second major new feature to debut for the Vox community is a Digg This button at the bottom of every Vox post. The button acts just like you would expect, but the release notes that include this feature also instruct users not to get too comfortable with the button, for it will apparently soon turn into a full-fledged Share feature that opens the door for many more social bookmarking and news services. As with the hinted links library feature, we'll just have to stay tuned for a new announcement.

As they stand now though, these are exciting new features that bring some powerful web 2.0 community aspects to Vox, opening it up to the rest of the blogosphere even more, and making it easier for Vox bloggers to participate in the global conversations they're interested in.