Yahoo launches "Buzz" - phew! not quite a Digg clone

Ignoring the question of whether Buzz, Yahoo's newly launched social news site and "meme tracker", will go any way towards turning around the company's fortunes (it won't), I'm already a fan. It's too easy to call the site a Digg-clone, but, like AOL's attempts before it, Yahoo Buzz does borrow from and build on many of Digg's best features.

Buzz is described as aggregating "the most popular stories right now, determined by people around the Web. A story's Buzz Score is based on your votes, searches, emails, and more." The most popular stories are given prominence on the Buzz homepage, and best yet, a few stories will be displayed on the mother ship, Yahoo.com.

Voting a story up is nothing new - hence the Digg comparison - but it's the way in which Yahoo is able to factor in search and email into its algorithm that makes the site intriguing. Not many potential new social news sites on the block have a search engine on tap to leverage in the way that Yahoo does. Digg certainly doesn't, although as Mathew Ingram points out, a partnership with Google would soon solve that.

Right now, Buzz is very much a beta and has initially been seeded with 100 popular news sources. Another thing to note about Buzz is that its starting off aimed at a very broad and mainstream crowd - the technology section doesn't even get its own tab and is instead a little buried in a drop down menu.