A lot of people out there are eagerly awaiting Digg to release a Picture section (should be sometime this month), in the meantime there’s another startup out there doing story, video, AND picture voting with a little bit of a more personal twist: Mixx.

Mixx is user-based voting site very much in the vein of Digg, but it does some interesting things to set it apart. The most apparent is the layout of the homepage, like like Digg’s sometimes monotonous list of stories, Mixx breaks it up a bit allowing you to personalize your layout on your main ‘Your Mixx’ page. The default is a nice blend of Popular Stories (which shows the number of votes it’s received plus the ‘up’ and ‘down’ vote arrows), Popular Photos (which you see a square thumbnail of), Popular Videos (which is unfortunately just the name of the video and not a thumbnail as well), Local Stories, and Popular Tags.

You can click on the second ‘Popular’ tab to see a much more Digg-like style for the site – which literally looks just like Digg but with a Photos area on the right side. Or you can click into any of the main categories to get just a list of stories, pictures, and videos that pertain to a specific area.

You also have a fairly standard profile which includes an icon, some info about you, your location, and Reddit and Slashdot-esque Karma points. One notable thing is that unlike Digg, Mixx allows people to see what stories you voted against in addition to which ones you voted for. You can even add individual users voting records to your main ‘Your Mixx’ page. Also interesting is that you can create and join groups which make it easier to share stories you find interesting with a select group of people.

There is an area known as ‘The Mixx Lounge’ that showcases the Top Mixxers in the last 24 hours as well as the Reddit-esque Mix Award winners (awards include things such as Conversation Starter, Most Opinionated, Top Submitter, Curmudgeon, etc…)

The area of Mixx with the most potential has to be the local area. Though it’s hard to tell how useful it can be when the service is in limited closed beta testing (for example there are 0 recent stories for the San Diego area), with enough users onboard this can easily become Digg for your local news stories. The ‘Local Opinion’ tab as has a lot of potential as it can show you what the people in your area are voting for or again.

Mixx looks to be a solid new entry into the social news field. While comparisons to Digg and the like are apt, Mixx looks like it has a good strategy in place to borrow the best of what works from existing services (voting on Digg, awards and karma on Reddit, votes down on Propeller – formerly Netscape), add a little something new (locality-based news and voting), and make it a very customizable experience. It helps that the site also looks very nice.

As I mentioned, Mixx is currently in closed beta, but I’ll be sure to let you know when I can invite you or you can sign up.