Will Yahoo buzz kill Digg?

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Yahoo buzz, which was on beta for only few selected publishers has open their doors to the public now. With a Digg like voting system and with a desperate need to catching up with the times yahoo has done something which was much needed for the survival of Yahoo inc. Did people need another social media network? Absolutely no. But we should not be stupid enough to simply ignore a system introduced by the world’s no 1 internet company. Yes, Google is still playing No 2 to yahoo in terms of page views and visits.

Yahoo buzz is now open for billions of web masters who are already in the rat race for bringing in more traffic. All the top Gurus are now looking for a way to game the buzz system. Just like they did with Digg. Which explains why digg is showing the same content of same popular web sites again and again. No matter how many friends you have ,No matter how many shouts you send for a particular article, if you are a small publisher it is very hard to get to Digg’s front page these days. It is like Digg has already chosen all the publishers they want in their Front page.

Will it be possible to game the yahoo buzz system? You only need a yahoo account in order to vote. I know people who have dozens of yahoo accounts. And almost everyone have friends using yahoo accounts. Personally in my country I do not personally know anyone with a Digg account. But everyone is using yahoo mail accounts. Which is just what the system needed for a vote.

But Yahoo has done something smart. They do not consider votes as the only way of moving stories to the home page. They take the search volumes and the emails shared when choosing the stories to be featured in their home page. And most importantly these stories will be in the yahoo home page. Not just in the yahoo buzz. Which will be an amazing boost for the publisher since yahoo is the No1 visited web site in the world. I would trade anything to be featured in the yahoo home page. (hmm. I did not really mean that.)

When considering how yahoo buzz acted in the last 24 hours since the launch, we can see the similar trend continuing as with other social networks. Fun stories and latest news are most voted by the users and are featured in the “top Buzz” category.

So how we add our posts to yahoo buzz?

There are no 3rd party widgets at the moment. But I am sure all existing services are in the process of adding yahoo buzz to their code. For the time being you have too add it manually which is not a difficult thing to do at all. Go to the yahoo buzz buttons page here, and select the button image you want to use.

Scroll down to the end of the page to see the yahoo buzz button I am using.(which is the best in my opinion.)

Once you select the button you will be given the script code which you have to paste in your site. Not like in Digg you will have to manually enter your post’s URL here. Replace it with the line “ARTICLEURL” in the button code. That’s it. Now, anyone with a yahoo account (Literally the whole internet population.) can vote for you. Within the next couple of weeks internet marketing gurus will publish ebooks on “how to get traffic from yahoo buzz”. And most will update their existing books with a new chaptor on “yahoo Buzz”.

But will all this hype be enough to kill Digg,the Already established No 1 voting system online. I cannot predict the future. But there is no such thing as “established No 1″ in this world. Who knew China would give USA a hard time like this in Olympics medals table. I say Yahoo buzz have a fair chance of beating Digg in the long run. With that said, if Digg can make their system more democratic and if yahoo failed to capitalize on opportunities (Common trend in Yahoo for the past few years.) Digg will be emerged the winner.

While the world is figuring out who is the best, I am submitting my stories to both Digg and Yahoo buzz. Helping my self to become a winner.

If you enjoy the post please digg and give a buzz on yahoo :-) And if you own a web site do not forget to add the all important “yahoo buzz” button to your posts.

—–New Update —–
It is being 2 hours since I publish this post. Yahoo Buzz started sending me quality traffic for this.
For the time being it is 6 times more than the Digg traffic I am getting. I will post the latest results after 24 hours. Buzz me up till then :-)

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