Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz is the new social news site of the week. It’s similar to Digg, Propeller, R-igg, and Mixx, in that users submit articles and posts they like, and the community votes on them. My favorite part of Yahoo! Buzz so far is that it is truly a democratic voting process, in that there is no “bury” or “down,” button. Users simply vote for a submission, or they don’t vote for it, and the posts with the most votes are pushed to the top. The scoring system is explained this way:

A subject’s buzz score is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read. Weekly leaders are the subjects with the greatest average buzz score for a given week.

For more detailed information, visit our FAQ

Anyone with a Yahoo! ID can sign-in to Yahoo! Buzz, and start using it. Unfortunately, at this time, the avatars are tied to Yahoo’s avatar system, and there is not an option to upload your own avatar – the one you use everywhere else. I suspect that will change, soon, since Yahoo! accepts user-generated avatars elsewhere. I like the feature that allows Yahoo! Buzz activity to be public or private.

This social networking option should be available on Wordpress Bookmarkify and ShareThis plug-ins shortly (I’d also love to see a toolbar option?), but for now, you can get the button for your blog posts here.

So far, we’ve submitted two Ft. Hard Knox articles to Yahoo! Buzz – one political, and one Sci-Tech, and haven’t been impressed with the traffic generated to FHK, yet, but the network is still very new, and has potential. The politics section is a bit sparse at the moment, but the Sci-Tech section is truly “Buzzing.”

Check it out!