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Yahoo Buzz, the company’s new so-called Digg competitor, is supposedly launching tomorrow, but we’ve stumbled upon (via Mashable France) parts of the site that are already live . You can see for yourself by going here.
Here’s how Yahoo is describing the new product:
“Yahoo! Buzz features 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. Stories with the highest Buzz Score may be displayed on the Yahoo! Homepage.”
Poking around the Entertainment section (the only thing that can be accessed via the above link), Yahoo Buzz does not appear to feature user-submitted stories like Digg, rather, it aggregates stories from around the Web and allows users to vote them up or down (“buzz up” or “buzz down” in Yahoo terms).
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Additionally, like TechMeme (or more like WeSmich in this example), you can see related stories. In this example, you can see that Jennifer Lopez giving birth to twins is the top story as sourced by Pop Sugar, with “related stories” from the likes of Access Hollywood, Glam, and USA Today. For each individual news item, you can vote, email it to a friend, or share it on social bookmarking sites and social networks.
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In addition to Entertainment, news categories include Sports, World, and Video, with more than a half dozen others listed under a “more” tab. As for the old Yahoo Buzz, which monitored trends going on in the search engine, “top searches” are updated hourly on the sidebar.
Another page we can get to is a page Yahoo has setup for publishers that want to get their content onto Buzz, which can be accessed here. According to that site, Yahoo will be offering tools to allow your own site's visitors to vote for your stories on Buzz, as well as APIs and syndication tools.