Digg clone opens doors to all, offering the allure of making it onto Yahoo's home page

(Computerworld) Yahoo Buzz, the social news site that Yahoo Inc. launched in beta form in February, may pose a serious threat to social news pioneer Digg.com, according to some industry observers and even Digg users.

Yahoo late yesterday opened Buzz to all publishers. The company said that said since the beta program opened last winter with 100 users, more than 300 publishers have been added. The site already boasts 5 million users, it said.

Buzz generates a "BuzzScore" based on user votes to rate the news stories, videos, images or blog posts on the Web. The top stories are then considered for placement on Yahoo.com.

Don Reisinger, a blogger at Mashable, said that Buzz could have a major impact on Digg's traffic and on its potential acquisition value.

"Since April … Digg's [traffic] numbers have been slumping," he noted. "Granted, they're not slumping too much and the site is still performing extremely well, but it is down nonetheless........


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