Wednesday, 27 February 2008

New "Yahoo! Buzz'' to Offer More Relevant, Open Content

Yahoo! Inc Tuesday introduced Yahoo! Buzz, an extension to Yahoo.com that opens up the Internet's leading starting point by uncovering the most interesting and relevant content from websites across the Internet and bringing more buzz-worthy stories to the homepage of Yahoo!.

Currently in beta, Yahoo! Buzz measures consumer votes and search patterns to identify interesting and timely stories and videos from large news sources as well as niche blogs around the Web. Top stories are then given primary editorial consideration for feature placement on Yahoo.com.

Yahoo! Buzz builds on an openness initiative Yahoo! launched last year in which editors began highlighting third-party content from across the Web in the "Featured Today" module on Yahoo.com.

This effort, according to Yahoo, has already provided tremendous value for consumers and publishers, representing a first step in the creation of a more open system for Web content.

Yahoo! Buzz can highlight anything - a major news event, an intriguing video or image, or an interesting blog post - and instead of editors, real people vote and search for their favorite stories to determine the top rated content from across the Web. Yahoo! Buzz ranks the most popular content of the moment using a unique approach that combines consumer votes with search popularity to give a story a Buzz Score. This new initiative creates a lens on what people are most interested in to enhance relevance on the popular Yahoo.com, and help publishers deliver their best content to Yahoo!'s broad and diverse audience of more than 500 million users.

"Yahoo Buzz is a good example of how we are continuing to innovate and open up our key starting points to third party publishers, making Yahoo! more social and personally relevant for our half a billion consumers," said Jeff Weiner, executive vice president, Yahoo! Network Division.

"In addition, we recently announced that we will be opening up our user interface for Yahoo! Search, as well as creating a smarter inbox by opening up Yahoo! Mail, two other key ways that consumers start with Yahoo!."