buzz

Yahoo's Buzz service, which lets people spotlight and find interesting Web sites, is now getting a piece of the Yahoo Open Strategy action.

A new Updates section on Yahoo Buzz site now displays sites that a person's social contacts have buzzed, Yahoo announced Thursday. In addition, people can share a personalized Buzz page that shows activity such as what sites they've buzzed, the sites they've voted up or down, and the comments they've left about buzzed sites.

"Yahoo is committed to creating the most relevant experience by enabling social interactions inside and outside of … Read more

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"--recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But … Read more

BuzzLogic, a start-up that tracks "influence" across the confusing blog landscape, has pushed its ad network out of beta to a full release.

The "Conversation Ad Network" debuted in beta mode in June and uses BuzzLogic's influence-tracking technology as a way to draw in both advertisers and bloggers. Advertisers are promised access to the most influential bloggers in their niches, and bloggers with that influence are offered more lucrative deals.

Prior to launching the ad network, BuzzLogic purchased ActiveWeave, manufacturer of browser plug-in BlogRovr, to shape it into a tool for clients. Then, during its … Read more

Whether it's the BlackBerry, the Internet, CNET TV, or hilarious jokes about the Large Hadron Collider, it's a good bet that someone either on or in today's show invented it. Probably Molly. Also in the news today, Nintendo is super rich, the first Android phone is getting a Steve-note (sans Steve) on September 23, and some celebrity Internet gossip.

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I am a comic genius! Daily Show thinks so, too! http://themolly.com/blog/?p=86

Official: First Android phone on September 23 http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/official-first.html … Read more

Updated at 11:50 am on 9/16/08 to clarify the role of Blueprint.

Yahoo isn't wasting time advertising Blueprint, the seasoned mobile development platform that received renewed attentions in San Francisco last week at CTIA 2008. On Tuesday, the company released the most recent fruit of Blueprint's labor, a widget for the mobile application Yahoo Go (review) that peddles Yahoo Buzz, its Digg-like social news service.

From the Yahoo Buzz widget, social newshounds can access a summary of top stories voted on in the previous twelve hours by Yahoo users' popular vote. They'll click for … Read more

BuzzCity, a mobile networking and advertising start-up based in Singapore, on Thursday announced a $10 million investment by South African media company Naspers.

BuzzCity has developed a mobile social-networking product called MyGamma, but it's not hoping to take on Facebook. MyGamma is geared toward "unwired" customers--those who have a mobile device but lack access to either a PC or a reliable broadband connection. That's probably why it attracted the attention of Naspers--market research firm Point Topic estimated late in 2007 that there were fewer than 300,000 broadband Internet subscriptions in South Africa out of a … Read more

Quick health update: Wilson is doing well and is on the miracle, three-day, cure-all Z-Pack. MTI fills in for another awesome show where we cut into our fillet of coastal beef, hook up a few treadmills to World of Warcraft, tell a turtle to stop snitching, and give you a Justin PSYu update. I'll give you a hint: it's in monochrome.

My favorite story on today's show involves a research turtle that accidentally stumbled upon a marijuana field in in our nation's capitol. The little guy was walking around with a GPS transmitter strapped to his … Read more

Yahoo's Digg-a-like Buzz is opening up to the world tonight. Until now, while anyone could see stories that had been Buzzed and vote them up or down, only about 400 publishers could contribute new links to the service.

A Yahoo spokesperson confirmed that it was always Yahoo's intention to open up Buzz, but that it kept the service restricted while it worked out bugs and refined the product. One might wonder what is so hard about building a site for submitting and rating products. There are tons out there. Yahoo made things a bit more difficult for itself … Read more

Propeller, AOL's social-news site that's never really managed to catch on, has a brand new look Tuesday. It's the third major rehaul since the service was launched as Netscape.com in mid-2006. Gone are the drab blacks, greens, and oranges from the Netscape.com days along with the teeny, tiny text that made me reach for the Ctrl+ shortcut in my browser. In its place is a more retro scheme with vibrant colors and a banana-shaped mustached mascot.

That's not the biggest change though. The old voting system that mimicked Digg's one vote per user … Read more