Yahoo Buzz-kill

Everyone is all excited about the new Yahoo offering called Yahoo Buzz. ReadWriteWeb has talked about how they love it not once, but twice. TechCrunch seems pretty happy as well, and Duncan Riley spent most of the weekend Tweeting about the number of comments he was receiving on his article that made the site.

ReadWriteWeb had statistics from Yahoo on the wonders they've done in feeding pageviews to the featured sites, with success stories listed as Salon.com, The Smoking Gun, Portfolio.com, Huffington Post, and Dallas Morning News. Notice anything in particular about the success stories?

They were all highly trafficked sites before Yahoo Buzz ever featured them. Like coals to Newcastle, Yahoo Buzz sends more eyes to sites who already had eyes. I don't think it's the Digg killer everyone is making it out to be.

Sure, it has a much nicer UI, and it is sending increases in page views large enough for even big sites to sit up and take notice, but the great thing about Digg is that it features sites you may have never seen before. Any site has a chance of getting noticed on Digg, which is what makes the site interesting and topical. In the screenshot I took (shown below), note that two of the top four articles in the Science/Tech category (combined since all nerds are apparently interested in the same things) are Yahoo News articles. The other two are Wired and Ars Technica. If I click to the second page, I get more Yahoo News articles, New York Times articles, and look! More Wired!

In fact, reading through the links, not a single article was something I hadn't already come across in my regular feeds or news browsing today. I'm not surprised that the top tech story was about China, the Tibetan protests, and what's on the web. I've been reading all about it.

I'm sure that the sites on the receiving end of Yahoo Buzz's largesse are pleased with the site, but in terms of overall usefulness, I'm not sure the huge traffic is going to last long-term when the news junkies realize they've already read most of the links somewhere else.

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