Earlier this year, Yahoo! opened its Buzz social news service, and its been very successful, surpassing Digg in terms of unique U.S. visitors. One noteworthy difference between Buzz and other sites is that only approved publishers were able to submit stories. However, on Monday Yahoo! opened Buzz up to all publishers.
The promotion aspect of Buzz, whereby hot stories get promoted to the Yahoo! front page, is a big draw for publishers. So you can expect that a lot of publishers would will be submitting their content to the site. As Yahoo! said in their press release announcing the change:
We started with about 100 publishing partners, which quickly grew to more than 400. Sites like Salon.com and GigaOm immediately saw an impact as their traffic soared when content climbed up the list and got selected for Yahoo.com. Now that benefit can come to any site online, making it possible to give as much visibility to extraordinary content from an obscure site as major news stories from big publishers.What does this mean for you? Anything you find on the Web is now buzzable. Any of the Web’s best current event stories, gossip, photos, videos and more can be submitted and shared on Yahoo! Buzz. You’ve already seen the “Buzz Up” buttons on many of your favorite sites, including New York Times, Us Weekly and BoingBoing. Now, as any site is able to add our button, you’ll have even more places to buzz to your heart’s content. And if you don’t see that button on a Web story you just have to share, you can submit a story right on Yahoo! Buzz. Like always, the more unique and compelling the story, the better chance your story of choice will buzz up to the Yahoo! homepage. Nice!
However, Buzz isn’t just about voting for, or rather, buzzing up a story. There’s an editorial team in charge, so don’t get all excited and start to think you can “game” the system. Chances are small to none that it would work.
