Open the Tubes

So this is pretty cool, I think.  Michael Arrington is reporting on TechCruch some results of being put on the Yahoo! homepage via their new Buzz service. I'll be honest and tell you that I've never even heard of this new Buzz thing before, but I've been a bit out of it lately.  It sounds like it's another Digg clone with a slight twist.  Stories that get voted high enough will make it to the front page of Yahoo!.  That means that if you get up there, you'll have the potential of a whole lot of traffic.  That's precisely what happens, too, based on Arrington's post.  In the online world, there is something known as the Slashdot Effect, and more recently the Digg Effect.  This is when a link becomes popular on the Slashdot or Digg sites, and suddenly has a ton of visitors.  While I'm not sure exactly how many people this sends over, it's considerable, but nothing like what Yahoo! can do.  None of this is my point, though.  What I found really interesting is what this means for broadening people's views.  The demographic of sites like Slashdot or Digg is pretty much nerdy pasty kids that are under 28, and probably have as much porn on their computers as you have music.  The vast majority of the public has never even heard of these sites.  However, a ton of people go to Yahoo.com everyday.  While a site like TechCruch probably makes it pretty high on Digg everyday, your typical Yahoo! user doesn't even know it exists.  What this means is that people who may usually be completely oblivious about some things online are suddenly seeing it linked to off their homepage.  These people may click through to a story on some tech site, and find it interesting enough to read something else there.  At this point, I should probably admit that this is an entirely selfish enjoyment I have for this new service.  Basically, it means that your average Joe (or Jane) now has potential to know just what the heck I'm talking about when I mention something I read online.  To me, that's pretty darn cool.  The trick, then, is to get these normally geek-centric sites to be appealing enough to attract the typical Yahoo! user (that is, assuming they even want them sticking around).  I'm basing that on the assumption that having one million users coming from Yahoo! is actually a beneficial thing for the site.