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Digg is probably one of the most popular social bookmarking sites on the ‘net, especially among the more technologically-inclined. If you manage to get one of your blog posts onto the front page of Digg, you will be on the receiving end of a massive deluge of traffic. That’s why people have even coined the term “Digg effect”, typically referring to how your server will likely crash from the number of visitors accessing your site. That effect is usually bigger than what StumbleUpon can provide in terms of site traffic.

As it turns out, Yahoo! wants a piece of this pie as well, but they’re not submitting a story to Digg (though I wouldn’t doubt that a few stories about this development will show up on Digg). Quite the opposite, in fact, because they have officially launched the open beta of Yahoo! Buzz. In their own words…

Yahoo! Buzz features the most popular stories right now, determined by people around the Web. A story’s Buzz Score is based on your votes, searches, emails, and more. Stories with the highest Buzz Score may be displayed on the Yahoo! homepage.

Sounds familiar, right? That’s because Yahoo! Buzz is essentially a clone of Digg. You submit a story and hope it gets voted onto the front page. The critical difference is that the number of votes is not the only determining factor; as you can tell from the description above, Yahoo! also takes searches and emails into account. I can see how they’d keep track of the former, but how do they account for the latter? Do they scan all incoming and outgoing messages from Yahoo! Mail to see if a certain URL has been mentioned? Scary thought.

The layout of Buzz is in line with the rest of the Yahoo! corporate image and I personally find the interface to be more intuitive and “average Joe” friendly than Digg, but that’s probably not enough for Yahoo! Buzz to, if you’ll pardon the pun, generate any real buzz. I don’t know anyone who still uses Yahoo! for searches, news, or… anything, really. Google’s growth is just out of control.

I wonder, though, if this Microsoft-Yahoo deal goes through, will Microsoft pump some major funds into marketing the new social news service? Will the combined powers of Yahoo! and MSN Search be enough to topple the big G? On the flip side, should we be expecting a Digg clone from Google soon too? Nah, they’ll probably just buy Digg from Kevin Rose.