Yahoo Puts the 'Buzz' in Social News, Launches Digg Competitor
Buzz is a social news site lets readers rank vote stories up or down.
Feb. 27, 2008 — -- Yahoo has finally launched its long-rumored Buzz portal, a social news site where you can vote stories up or down, with the chance to send the day's most popular stories to a featured spot on the Yahoo homepage.
The obvious comparison for Yahoo Buzz is the social news kings, Digg and Reddit. But, while there are some similarities, Buzz is not just a Digg clone.
Yahoo Buzz is aimed at a much more mainstream audience, one that doesn't care about wading through tech-related minutia to find a worthwhile article to read.
Perhaps the most obvious difference is that Yahoo Buzz stories are not user-submitted, rather Buzz aggregates stories from select publishers and then users can vote them up or down. While that means Buzz will lack the variety of sources that you'll find on Digg, it also handily eliminates a good bit of spam and the pointless link bait articles that clutter up the Digg homepage.
But the "select publishers" are not just mainstream media outlets, there's also a good bit of content pulled from smaller sites like Make Magazine and WordPress blogs. Overall Buzz strikes a good balance between the big news sites and smaller sources.
[Full disclosure: Wired.com is one of the 100 publishers participating in the beta phase of Yahoo Buzz. Wired is also owned by Conde Nast, which operates Reddit, a potential competitor to Yahoo Buzz.]
Another key difference between Digg and Buzz is that rankings on Buzz are not determined by voting alone. While voting is still the primary means of moving a story up in the rankings, Yahoo is also mining its search logs in real-time and matching the results of frequently searched terms to what's hot on Buzz -- if a story topic is frequently searched the Buzz story will get an added boost in ranking.
Buzz ends up a bit like the free for all of Digg combined with the regulated approach of Techmeme.
The algorithmic addition is then combined with a human hand that will decide which of Buzz's two or three top stories will be bumped up to Yahoo's homepage.
