Screw Digg’s pimple faces, Buzz will blow up our servers

Written on 19th August 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

If you’re following other tech blogs, you probably can’t help noticing that everybody is raving about Yahoo Buzz. The Digg-like service – which grants possibile access to a mention on the Yahoo! frontpage – is now open to every web publisher. This is something a lot of people have been waiting for, since spectacular stories about millions of incoming clicks from Yahoo! have been buzzing around for a while.

Former TechCrunch editor Nick Gonzalez told us during the San Francisco edition of Web 2.0 Expo that a mention on Yahoo’s frontpage brought in an “insane amount of traffic”. This happened with a post by Duncan Riley about Japanese Internet service providers that wanted to ban file sharers from the Internet. Gonzalez: “Somebody buzzed the story, and somebody else did as well. It ended up at the Yahoo front page, which leads to around 300,000 clicks per second. That’s a crap load of users”.

Although some people say the numbers Gonzalez mentioned are impossible, the fact still is that your post “being buzzed” is an impressive example of what social media can do.

Forget about Digg’s pimple faces

So let’s forget about Digg. I’ve removed the Digg button from its excellent position and replaced it with the Buzz voting tool. Sure, we got on the Digg frontpage twice (1, 2), but after all, those incoming Digg clicks are from 2.7 million pimple faces anyway.

Want to have a Buzz button on your blog as well?

Browse to this page and make a selection. If you have a Wordpress blog as well, you’ll need to insert the following code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = “<?php the_title(); ?>”;yahooBuzzArticleCategory = “Sci/Tech”;yahooBuzzArticleType = “text”;yahooBuzzArticleId =”<?php the_permalink() ?>”;</script><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://d.yimg.com/ds/badge2.js” badgetype=”small-votes”></script>