I have just come across the Yahoo! Buzzapplication which is currently in beta testing. From what I can see this is very much like Digg and Sphinn in that users provide articles of interest which are then voted on by the users to push them up the listings.
Stories are given a “buzz score” which is “derived from search term popularity, the number of times a story is emailed from Buzz, and the number of votes a story receives.” Which could add a slight element of mystery if it is more than simply a case of adding the sum of all these parts together. If it is going to work much like the quality score system in PPC then it may change the game a little and avoid all the spamming which takes place in Digg. There will apparently be a manual editorial team in place to prevent spamming from taking place but how many and how effective they will be remains to be seen.
The other major twist in the tale is the statement from the site “stories with the highest Buzz Scores may be published on the Yahoo! home page.” this would make the reach of top performing articles massive and the potential of this new application greater than that of Digg and Sphinn as it goes beyond the user base of the programme itself. Apparently the same editorial team which will monitor the spam will also be responsible for deciding which stories are worthy of the Yahoo homepage exposure. It will be interested to see what prominence these articles are given as they are free content and so Yahoo! would potentially be losing out on revenue if they replaced any of the paid placements.
It will be interesting to see how this progresses and whether the exposure on the Yahoo! homepage can make it a bigger property than the more established players in social bookmarking.