Valleywag has some screenshots of the future Yahoo Buzz, a future competitor for Digg. With its huge user base, Yahoo has a very good chance at making it popular, but there is something that bothers me.

At the start, Yahoo Buzz will feature stories from a limited number of sites, 100 to be exact. Later they will open the site for submissions from all sites accepted in the Yahoo Publisher Network. So, again, only US bloggers and sites will be able to use this Yahoo site to get traffic.

Here’s the scenario that bothers me: a blogger that doesn’t have YPN breaks the news about an event. On the front page of Yahoo Buzz would get someone that isn’t the original source, just someone that stole the story. In this aspect they would be inferior to Digg, as they can’t ask for original sources to be submitted to the site. If Yahoo Buzz gets enough traffic, one can build up a site just by rewriting great stories that hit the front page of Digg or Reddit and can’t do the same on Yahoo Buzz because of the nationality of the blogger.

If YPN isn’t open to the entire world in the future, this can really be a problem as far as I can tell.

Also, the algorithm for reaching the front page is a mix between popular searches and user votes. It’s an interesting connection with the Yahoo search engine. A surge in searches for a term can boost a story to the front page much easier. I wonder if this can be manipulated.

For example, when a celebrity gets married and their name is searched a lot for a few days, mention their name in the story/description/tags of the story even if it’s not about that celebrity, and if Yahoo Buzz picks up the keywords, it gives a boost to your story because it seems related to the surge in keyword searches.

What do you think? It seems pretty nuts to me to limit the sources for such a site only to those that have YPN.

Pics first published by Valleywag

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