But is it democratic, asks Read/Write Web.
Answer: no. Well not in the sense that they are asking.
Yahoo Buzz is an interesting idea, but a boring site to actually use (for me, anyway). It’s a bit like Digg but less niche, making it a more pedestrian and mainstream news agenda. I’m clearly not in their target market. Of course it sends shedloads of traffic to those sites who manage to get items on the frontpage – particularly as it also appears on the front page of yahoo.com
As RWW suggested, the lack of transparency about how things get to the front page seems to create a lack of enthusiasm for users to actually interact with it. There is a suggestion that web marketers will be furiously trying to work out how to game the system.
I wonder how game-able it will really be, if it is truly moderated. Slashdot has only a few editors and a very sophisticated system of comment moderation, but it seems that all the story submissions are still hand-selected.
storymachine 