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Unlike Digg, Buzz does not let people submit just any stories from across the Web. Instead, Buzz is seeded with articles and videos from about 100 pre-selected news sites and blogs, among them Wired.com, Forbes, Time, The Huffington Post, Boing Boing, Portfolio, and Salon.
What is the rationale behind this seeding? It seems to me that this limits the utility of Buzz and unduly restricts the content that a Buzz user might be exposed to. After all what is so good about Digg is that it brings me into contact with web sites I might otherwise overlook.
And why is the 'buzz up!' link not in the Share menu along with the Digg, Reddit, etc. links? Is there something in it for Salon for giving it such prominence?
Buzz is making itself irrelevant before it even gets off the ground. This is a classic case of Big Media jumping onto a trend and trying to remake it in its own sickly, plastic image. "Here's this crazy thing all the kids are into these days, we can mass-produce a bland repackaged version and sell it back to them for a ton of money!" Sites like Digg (and YouTube, and DeviantArt, and ...) are successful precisely because they don't try to guide the content according to an MBA agenda; they let the users decide what they want to see.
