Yahoo! Opens up Buzz

Yahoo's Buzz social bookmarking service was built as a competitor to Digg, and even Yahoo's own Del.icio.us social bookmarking services. For the first 6 months of its life, Buzz only worked with links from top publishers Yahoo! allowed into its system. Just this week, Yahoo! opened Buzz up to the whole internet. Now you can submit links from any web site.

If you want to add a Buzz link to your site, Yahoo! offers simple JavaScript badges you can embed on your page to let your visitors Buzz the page for you.

Though Yahoo! doesn't document how to build your own Buzz links, here's how it can be done using an URL. The basic syntax of the URL is:
http://buzz.yahoo.com/submit/?submitUrl=PAGEURL&submitHeadline=HEADLINE&submitSummary=DESCRIPTION&submitCategory=CATEGORY&submitAssetType=TYPE

Each of the values is described here:

• submitUrl - The page URL your want to submit (with special characters escaped)



• submitHeadline - The title of the page you're submitting (with spaces converted to + or %20)



• submitSummary - The description of the page (with spaces converted to + or %20)



• submitCategory - The category you want Yahoo! Buzz to list your page in. Possible categories are: business, entertainment, health, images, lifestyle, politics, science, sports, travel, usnews, video, or world_news



• submitAssetType - The media type of your link. Possible types are: article (which they display as "Text"), image, or video.
  

Here's an example link to Buzz up this blog entry.

Proliferation of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking (saving links for your favorite web pages to a public site) has exploded in the last few years in terms of people using social bookmarking services, traffic to the bookmark sites, and the sheer number of me-too services. Here's a summary of some of the services available, and JavaScript links you can copy so your visitors can promote your pages in their bookmarks.

The Granddaddy of All Social Bookmarking Sites

digg.com - News and web pages. Started out for the techy set, but has expanded to a general interest audience.

Big sites dedicated to social bookmarking

These sites have from 1-3 million visitors per month according to Compete.com:

stumbleupon.com
reddit.com
technorati.com - A blog search engine. Tends to have the techy and science crowd.
del.icio.us - A general interest bookmark service. Acquired by Yahoo!

Portal Sites

All the big portals have added their own social bookmarking services.

bookmarks.yahoo.com - One of Yahoo! three or more mookmarking features. Nothing like focusing your business...
facebook.com - The social networking site for college kids and fresh-outs.
favorites.live.com - Microsoft's MSN followon.
favorites.my.aol.com - AOL
google.com/bookmarks - Google's bookmarking feature.
myjeeves.ask.com - Yet another search engine's bookmarking.
myspace.com - The social network for high school kids.
myweb.yahoo.com - Another Yahoo! bookmarking service.
netscape.com - Another AOL one.

Medium Sized Verticals

These sites focus mostly on social bookmarking and discussion forums, and have between 100,000 and 1,000,000 visitors a month, though not all exclusively to their bookmarking feature:

slashdot.org/bookmark - The discussion site for cranky software developers.
newsvine.com - A general interest user-submitted news links site.
fark.com - News of the weird for the fraternity crowd.
faves.com
blinklist.com
mixx.com
furl.net
segnalo.alice.it
diigo.com

Smaller Bookmarking Verticals

These sites have between 10,000 and 100,000 visitors per month.

ma.gnolia.com
netvouz.com
simpy.com
backflip.com
spurl.net
blogmarks.net
linkagogo.com
mister-wong.de
feedmelinks.com