Yahoo building buzz with buzz

On the face of it, Yahoo Buzz seems very much to be a Digg clone in the way it's supposed to work. It asks users to vote on the news narrative they like. Content that gets lots of votes will then be featured on its front page.

In other ways, Buzz is different from Digg. It isn't based entirely on user votes. As Yahoo explains, "A story is ranked based on its Buzz Score. The score is derived from hunt term popularity, the figure of times a story is emailed from Buzz, and the figure of votes a story receives." This is likely a more realistic measure of the popularity of an article than merely totaling votes. With three different metrics, it may suffer less from user effort to game the scheme.

Digg and similar sites often suffer from this job. The news media natural covering social sites study regularly on user effort on Digg to push various stories to the top - or bury them. There's even supposed to be an informal group of users called the "Bury Brigade" that tries to keep inappropriate or spammy stories from visual perception the light of day for very long.

In add-on to using more than one metric function, Yahoo Buzz uses human editors, not computing machine programs, to decide when an item has received enough "buzz" to go on its front page. Sure, it can be exciting to make it to the front page of sites such as Digg or Slashdot, but even those sociable sites don't see Yahoo's level of traffic. Yes, it's only the second-most-popular search engine, but Yahoo's front page still receives 90 million visitors every month - and that's from the US alone. Just how fast would Slashdot's or Digg's servers melt under that kind of traffic?

To give you an idea of the power and influence to which this translates, let me quote a New York Times article reporting on Yahoo Buzz before it went live. "In a test of the service this year, Yahoo linked from its front page to content from Esquire magazine for just three hours. In that brief period of time, traffic to the Esquire.com site, which already allows users of Digg and Reddit to vote on its stories, doubled for the month." Look at that again. Traffic doubled for the month - after being linked to Yahoo's home page for only three hours!