What's buzzing on the web? Wouldn't it be nice to know? Using a combination of techniques which include sophisticated algorithms, click tracking and human
editors BuzzFeed, a NY-based startup, discovers and distributes what is buzzing on the Web.
BuzzFeed's simple, elegant blog-like design was influenced by Jason Kottke. The light, clean background and orange accents makes the page pop like shiny candy for your eyes. Images and large text display categorized buzz from the Web.
BuzzFeed offers a number of categories that currently include: popular, culture, celebrity, sports, style, science, food, music, business, technology, TV, movie and politics. Each category offers a feed so you can easily add it to your favorite feed reader or personalized home page. I just added the technology BuzzFeed to myPage on myAOL (as shown here). BuzzFeed also offers a daily archive of the most popular items.
With the mission of finding good things, promoting good sites and web-fying PR and advertising, BuzzFeed acts as 24 hour a day, seven day a week online popularity contest where the most popular stories are showcased. BuzzFeed is similar to Digg and other community news sites but unlike those site BuzzFeed does not offer users a way to vote or rate content with active inputs but instead relies on passive input via a click tracking coupled with algorithmic wizardry and human editor interactions to deliver the most buzzworthy news.
BuzzFeed is not just a destination site, it also offers widgets and badges to site owners. I added Somewhat Frank to the BuzzFeed network
and added a customized BuzzFeed widget in the right column of
this site. The widget offers up new and interesting items. BuzzFeed aggregates related content similar to Google News and Sphere but displays the content on a single page with the popular story theme also showing up on the BuzzFeed widget. As part of
the BuzzFeed network sites will benefit by getting their site "name in lights" when content on their site matches that of buzzing content.
Bottom-line: BuzzFeed offers an clean and simple consumer facing application with clever algorithms and human editors doing the heavy-lifting behind the scenes to display the buzz from around Web.
