The company’s open content strategy picked up steam with the debut of the social media site Yahoo Buzz.
Yahoo dropped a couple of new initiatives onto the Internet, as part of this strategy. Yahoo Buzz generated some buzz itself, as rumors of its imminent debut bounced around the Net in recent weeks.
The natural comparison of Yahoo Buzz to social media darling Digg begins and ends at the front page. Publishers who have seen their content hit Digg’s front page know how much traffic that drives to their sites. Yahoo Buzz takes it a step further.
Yahoo calls Buzz an extension of Yahoo.com. Stories that receive a lot of attention of Buzz may end up on the Yahoo.com homepage. While Digg can take credit for driving traffic, Yahoo happens to be the most heavily trafficked web property online.
Plaudits for this in the form of praise from sites like Wired.com and People Digital accompanied the formal announcement of Yahoo Buzz. Being on Yahoo’s front page means traffic, and a lot of it.
Each top story offers options for visitors to Buzz it up or down. People can share a story via email, or post it to one of six other social media sites: Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Propeller, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
Yahoo plans to broaden the number of publisher partners it has accepted into Buzz; unlike other social media sites, there is no option to submit a story for consideration by the Buzz audience, making it something of a walled garden at the moment.
However, the joy of openness should continue to permeate Yahoo Buzz as they plan to release syndication tools in the future. APIs and customized modules will give third-party publishers the ability to add Buzz to their sites.
