Yahoo finally opens up its much anticipated Digg-like content portal, Yahoo! Buzz. Yahoo! Buzz is an extension of Yahoo.com and is similar to top social bookmarking site Digg but in a more controlled environment.
Yahoo! Buzz would contain major news event, intriguing videos or images, extra-ordinary blog posts, that will be selected based on consumer posts and search patterns to ensure that only the most interesting and timely stories and videos from news sources, niche blogs are featured.
Once featured on Yahoo! Buzz, these contents will then be subject for voting by Yahoo users to determine the top rated content from across the web, measured in terms of Buzz scores. Buzz score is a combination of consumer votes and search popularity.
If you still don’t get what Yahoo! Buzz is, think of it as a hoi polloi of Stumble Upon, Digg, Squido and all the other buzz-generating web tools available on the net. The only difference is that it is running on Yahoo’s property. And since it is within Yahoo’s internet property, that means contents are up for viewing by Yahoo’s more than 500 million users.
With Yahoo! Buzz, Yahoo is hoping to open up an ecosystem of advertisers, publishers and consumers. Yahoo is giving advertisers a new avenue for displaying their ads, publishers a new portal to showcase their content and consumers, a new source of valuable contents.
Yahoo! Buzz beta currently contains 100 publishers that range from large online publishing brands to small influential blogs. Publishers will be given an online badge which they can embed in their websites to serve as voting button for their contents. Yes, think of it as the famous Digg button.
Now here’s the fun part, stories featured on the Yahoo! Buzz will have a link back to the publisher’s website from the Yahoo! Buzz portal. So, you can just imagine that flow of traffic coming into that particular website if its content gets featured on Yahoo Buzz.
Let’s wait and see how far Yahoo! Buzz would be buzzing of the web. With so many Digg-like clones around, I wonder why Yahoo deemed it necessary to come up with another one?
