Yahoo has sets its Digg rival “Buzz,” the content recommendation service since early this year was available only to a select 400 publishers; will be opening up to public contributors as of 7 p.m. PDT tonight, accelerating its challenge against Digg.
Although Yahoo Buzz is somewhat similar to Digg service, but utilizes advanced algorithms to avoid gaming of the system and has the advantage of having its content on Yahoo’s home page. Thus with its Buzz service, which will employ users’ votes on the most interesting stories on the Internet is now “Buzzable” by submitting it via Yahoo Buzz.
Since the service’s launch in February, anyone could see stories that had been ‘Buzzed’ and vote them up or down; only a select 400 publishers could contribute new links to the service.
“What does this mean for you? Anything you find on the Web is now buzzable,” The service is somewhat similar to Digg and will have users “buzz” the best stories, which will later bring them to the Yahoo homepage. The more unique and compelling the story, the better chance your story of choice will buzz up to the Yahoo homepage, said Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of front doors, communities, and network services at Yahoo on a company blog.
Bhat further described buzz as “an innovative approach for you to discover, vote for, and share the content and stories that matter most to you.”
Almost any publisher can now add a “Buzz Up” button to their Web site, Bhat wrote. If a reader wants to [Buzz] an article that does not have the Buzz button attached, they can submit a link to the content directly on the Yahoo Buzz Web site.
“As always, the more unique and compelling the story, the better chance your story of choice will buzz up to the Yahoo homepage,” Bhat said.
With numerous submitting and rating sites out there, including the mighty Digg, Yahoo Buzz has a couple of advantages up its sleeve. Apart from 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.
Buzz also can influence other Yahoo communities such as: Delicious, Flickr, and Upcoming could get famous Buzz links to feed items into the system. That would not appear initially, but links the other way will: When you buzz something, you will also be able to share it on Delicious, or on Digg, StumbleUpon, or other services.
The new service can include everything from the latest news, to intriguing images or videos, and viewers will need to vote their favorites if they want to see them among the most popular. The system is meant to increase both the popularity of Yahoo’s website, as well as improve the way viewers relate to the content of Yahoo pages.
Hitting the Yahoo’s home page and getting server-melting traffic will likely create a new frenzy among Web traffic manipulators who are already pushing their luck with Digg and AOL’s Propeller. Buzz wants to avoid this kind of exploitation by adding editorial discretion when determining headlines.
The main idea is not the ranking itself, but rather allowing users to contribute to Yahoo’s front page and better relate to it. According to statistics, Yahoo has an audience of tens of millions of viewers monthly in the United States alone, which means plenty of Buzzes.
Already, the new service overtook Digg in traffic scores, attracting nearly 7 million unique U.S. visitors. So, if you are a webmaster, it is time to start adding those Yahoo Buzz buttons to your website right away, to get a chance for some server-melting traffic.
Buzz Up has its own Web page, and Yahoo said some of the most popular content there could end up on its main home page.
Publishers can benefit from the “social content voting” because a less-trafficked site could see a surge in visits if an item is highlighted by enough visitors. That can mean more clicks or page views for advertisements, which increase a Web site’s revenue.
Another interesting feature that Yahoo brings is the possibility of adding any type of Web page to Buzz. This on the whole means that pages that are not in a news or blog format could be submitted as new links on Buzz. Buzz pages could soon offer such diverse links as museum sites, Twitter messages and patent fillings alongside the select publishers’ articles Yahoo favors today.
Shortly after its initial launch in February, the new service managed to go beyond Digg in traffic scores, attracting nearly 7 million unique U.S. visitors. What is more, 51 percent were women, compared to Digg’s 39 percent female users.
The Top Buzz stories on Tuesday included the Olympics, with pieces on Shawn Johnson, Nastia Liukin, Michael Phelps, and a “swimsuit controversy” about Spain’s synchronized swimmers. Also there were links to stories about the Stand Up to Cancer star-studded telethon, a major new attack by the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hurricane Fay, Obama’s “message sharpening,” and a Russian military unit leaving a Georgian city.
There are also listings of the top Yahoo searches, which today included Jennifer Aniston, tropical storm Fay, Bigfoot, the Beijing Olympics 2008 and Iran; as well as The Buzz Log, which includes original columns about “what is hot on Yahoo Buzz and why”.
Opening Buzz to the public will make “it possible to give as much visibility to extraordinary content from an obscure site as major news stories from big publishers,” Bhat said.
Buzz code and more information are available here.