Yahoo to open up Buzz submissions to public

While news aggregator Buzz has been up for about six months, until now, users could only vote for content, and the link inclusion process was limited to suggestions from only 400 publishers. That's about to change.

Beginning next Monday at 10:00 pm EDT, users will be able to submit content suggestions to Yahoo Buzz, as it emerges from beta. If a content item gets enough votes, it will appear on the front page of Yahoo.

Yahoo said that it was the ultimate goal of the company to open it up to everyone, although it wanted to make sure that it had ironed out most of the bugs first. The opening of the site is good news for publishers big and small.

Despite being fairly new to the social news scene, Buzz has already made a name for itself. The site passed Digg in terms of unique users in April, and several Web site publishers have reported significant traffic increases by being featured on Buzz.

Buzz works much like Digg in the fact that users can submit links which are then voted on, up or down. However, the service also takes into account search engine popularity when determining rankings, it has said.

But there are some things about the Buzz system that Yahoo does not immediately let on. A Buzz item's path directly to the Yahoo homepage -- where it would receive tremendous traffic -- is not believed to be automatic: instead, Yahoo is likely vetting content before it's placed on the front page.

Additionally, during the beta, publishers selected by Yahoo could not be part of Google's AdSense network, and had to join the Yahoo Publishers Network. Some suggest that the company's partners may get preferential treatment.

"Editorial and advertising weren't separated in the first iteration of Buzz - how separate will they be now?" Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote for ReadWriteWeb on Monday.