Yahoo! Buzz is a community-based news article website, much like Digg, that combines the features of social bookmarking and syndication through a user interface that allows editorial control. Users can be allowed to publish their own news stories, and link to their own or another person’s site that links to a full story of the information, therefore driving traffic to that person’s website and creating a larger market for sites that research and publish their own news articles and stories, such as CNN or smaller, privately owned websites. With so many submitting and rating sites out there, including the mighty Digg, Yahoo Buzz has a few advantages up its sleeve. Besides using the links submitted by contributors, Buzz’s algorithms take into account search engine popularity, feeding the most popular stories to Yahoo’s home page. With so many submitting and rating sites out there, including the mighty Digg, Yahoo Buzz has a few advantages up its sleeve. Besides using the links submitted by contributors, Buzz’s algorithms take into account search engine popularity, feeding the most popular stories to Yahoo’s home page.

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. Yahoo plans to beta launch Yahoo Buzz as a competitor to Digg, and a tipster supplied Valleywag with screenshots. Buzz, built under the direction of VP Tapan Bhat, will begin with a limited number of publishers — about 100 — and will rank stories based on popular search results and user voting.

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.  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.

Like Digg, Buzz is divided into news categories — world news, sports, business, entertainment, travel and more. There are also dedicated sections for image and video links. Perhaps the most telling aspect of Buzz’s design is that the Tech/Sci category — a Digg staple — is buried near the bottom the of the “more” drop down menu. Buzz code and more information is available on the Buzz site.

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 5:23 am | by Kur-nia-one |