Finally, Yahoo launches its long-rumored Buzz portal, a social news site where readers vote stories and earn a chance to send their favorite story to the featured spot on the Yahoo homepage.

Immediately Yahoo Buzz is being compared closely to the Digg, the social news king.

Yahoo Buzz is created to aim at a much more mainstream audience and the main difference between Buzz and Digg is that the stories are basically not submitted by users. Buzz gets stories from qualified publisher and then users vote the stories.

The qualified publisher varied from other mainstream media outlets like Reuters to smaller news site like Make Magazines to maintain a good balance of sources and variety in the stories.

Digg and Buzz are also different in terms of ranking method. Yahoo is also taking in account its search logs in real-time and then match the results of frequently searched terms to what’s hot on Buzz. Meaning if a certain story is searched frequently in Yahoo search engine, the Buzz story’s ranking will be increased too.

Digg has suffered criticisms because of the over-cluttered community and stories and its link-bait infectious manner. But that’s what makes Digg interesting.

Study the similarities of all these giant social sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Digg, Reddit and such; they have one thing obvious in common. They are all users orientated with users calling the shot and play active roles.

People want to be heard and Buzz fails to listen.

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