Yahoo Buzz to take on Digg

Social news gathering site launched

27 February 2008 0:37 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Yahoo might be busy fending off approaching from Microsoft, but that hasn't stopped the company trying to take on social news gathering site Digg with the launch of a new service called Yahoo! Buzz.

According to the struggling search engine, the new site features "the most popular stories right now, determined by people around the web".

If you thought that sounds familiar, then Digg lovers will love the ability to set a story's "Buzz Score" based on "your votes, searches, emails, and more" with the highest stories displayed on the Yahoo homepage.

However Yahoo, momentarily forgetting Digg, believes it is innovating:

"Yahoo! Buzz is a good example of how we are continuing to innovate and open up our key starting points to third party publishers, making Yahoo! more social and personally relevant for our half a billion consumers", said Jeff Weiner, executive vice president, Yahoo! Network Division.

But before you go and try and submit your own site. You won't be able to, the service currently in beta, is only taking content from around 100 publishers at the moment.

Participating publishers are given an online "badge" enabling their readers to vote and submit stories to Buzz in real-time.

Stories with the highest Buzz Scores will be highlighted via direct links to the publishers' sites and submitted to Yahoo.com's editors for possible coverage on the Yahoo homepage.

Full tags

Software, Online, Yahoo, digg