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Yahoo Buzz Opens Doors To Everyone
Buzz, Yahoo’s Digg-like effort to leverage reader gestures and third party content in determining the most popular news, removes it’s barriers to entry tonight.
Until now only a hundred or so invited publishers could post news to Buzz. This was a big plug - Yahoo pushes a few Yahoo Buzz stories to their home page every day, resulting in huge, server-melting traffic surges to the lucky third party sites. Starting tonight, the invitation requirement is gone, and anyone can submit their stories to Buzz.
It’s hard to compare Buzz to Digg. Like AOL’s Propeller, they chose to add editorial discretion in determining headlines to reduce gaming. That also seems to make users less interested in participating, though. In Yahoo’s case the fact that they promote headline stories on the home page of Yahoo gives them a huge traffic boost, which skews results.
Stories can be submitted here once it goes live in a few hours.
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Propeller 2.0 Launches: Ditching The Vote Count, Adding A Mascot
Propeller, AOL’s Digg-like news site, launches version 2.0 later this morning. The site sports a new design and logo and now has a mascot - described as “part professor, part citizen journalist” (see image below).
But the biggest feature change is the removal of a pure Digg-like vote count. In its place is an algorithm based popularity ranking of 1-10, which takes into account “many more aspects of participation” when determining popularity. Voting on a story is now called the more nebulous “prop it.” The service has also cut down the number of news categories. Those remaining include Arts & Entertainment, Business & Finance, Family, Humor, News, Science & Technology, Sports and Style.
Taking a page from the Yahoo Buzz playbook, headlines from the service will also be integrated directly into AOL and AOL News.
Propeller has had a rocky history. It first launched in June 2006 under the Netscape.com domain as “a better Digg” in that paid editors chose the top stories from user-submitted and voted links. Soon the site was paying top Digg users to move to them.
In August 2007 rumors circulated that the site was going to be shut down. We called it “Kaput” last September, but we were wrong: the site would live on under a new domain, Propeller.com.
Netscape traffic promptly spiked downward, but Propeller, led by general manager Tom Drapeau, filled the gap and has had steady growth since then.
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Bbuzz.fr rejoint la communauté Diggons.com
Publish2 To Launch Digg Variation As Journalist Resource
Update: screenshot and additional details of Publish2 is here.
New startup Publish2 hasn’t launched or even entered private beta yet, but the company has scored $2.75 million in funding. The investor, Velocity Interactive Group, believes in the idea so much that they put both Ross Levinsohn and Jonathan Miller on the board of directors.
Publish2 is talking freely about the product, they just won’t show it to anyone yet. The idea is to create a news resource for news rooms, who are increasingly stressed due to headcount cuts and competition with blogs.
The main service will be a Digg-like social bookmarking site, says CEO Scott Karp. Like Digg, anyone can submit a link to a news story. But the only people who can vote on stories are pre-approved journalists. The goal, he says, is to avoid Digg’s spamming issues and ensure that only quality news can get to the top in any category. He says it’s “Digg, powered by journalists.”
It’s sort of the opposite of Yahoo Buzz, which launched last month, in its approach. Buzz only takes links from pre-approved sites, but anyone can vote. Top stories must pass through an editor, though, before going to the Yahoo home page.
It seems that everyone has tried one variation or another of Digg. In addition to Buzz, AOL launched Propeller in 2006, which also required editors to approve top stories. And there are others with models that fall somewhere in between.
Publish2 will also allow newsrooms to use the service to create customized headline feeds Presumably the quality will be high because only journalists get to vote stories up. That may be true. But it’s just as likely Publish2 will end up a ghost town. One of the main reasons for Digg’s success was the viral way stories spread. People send stories to their friends to get them to Digg them up. Those people, seeing Digg perhaps for the first time, may come back to read the news. Publish2 won’t have that benefit.
We’ll withhold judgment until the product launched and we can take a look for ourselves.
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Yahoo Buzz Launches: Popular Stories To Go On Yahoo Homepage
Yahoo launches the much anticipated Yahoo Buzz tonight - a Digg-like site that takes stories from pre-approved news publishers (100 to start) and let’s users vote on stories and push them up to the top of the page.
To see it in action, click on the buzz button at the end of this, or any, of our posts (update: button functionality won’t be live until Tuesday). Like Digg, the more users that vote for a story, via the embedded button or on the Buzz site, the higher the story goes on Buzz. But user voting isn’t the only factor in how well stories do. Yahoo is also looking at their search engine logs in real time to determine hot or breaking news. Stories on that topic will get an extra boost in the rankings.
But there’s another part of Buzz that will get publishers excited - every day a few of the most popular stories will also be featured on the Yahoo home page. Yahoo has been experimenting with linking to third party news directly from their home page since last year. In one case, the Buzz team told me, 2 million visitors were sent to Wired for a linked article in the two hours it was on the Yahoo home page. 2-3 stories from Buzz will go on the Yahoo home page daily.
Buzz has categories including entertainment, world news, U.S. news, sports, business, health, and travel. Images and video are also separate categories.
Of course, many publishers won’t be able to handle that kind of traffic flow. But Yahoo is also prepared for that. Smaller sites will only be linked on a fraction of the total home page views - in effect, Yahoo is turning down the firehose for those that can’t handle it.
Yahoo isn’t the first large company to try out the Digg model. In mid 2006 AOL relaunched the Netscape portal as a Digg-like site. AOL eventually moved the service to a different domain name and renamed it Propeller. The service has about 3.8 million monthly unique visitors (Comscore), compared to about 12.5 million for Digg.
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Yahoo Buzz Launching Soon
Half of the country’s tech bloggers and journalists, it seems, are under embargo around next week’s launch of Yahoo Buzz. Word has still leaked, likely from recently layed off Yahoo employees. We’re under embargo, too, so I can’t say much. But the posters up all over Yahoo give a taste of what is.
“We’re re-launching Yahoo! Buzz as a destination site where users determine the best stories & videos” - sounds a lot like Digg to me. The URL given in the poster - alpha.buzz.yahoo.com - can only be accessed by Yahoo employees. The launch URL will be buzz.yahoo.com. If you happen to be online, check out TechCrunch at 9 pm on Monday.
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