Yahoo Buzz Drops Source RestrictionsYahoo Buzz Drops Source Restrictions

Yahoo Buzz is now open to all Web pages.

The news aggregation site was previously limited to less than 500 publishers specifically authorized by Yahoo. The company announced through two blog posts that it will now allow users to submit any Web page for inclusion in its lineup of interesting stories.

The company explained in a blog that it originally aimed to control the quality and reliability of sites that Yahoo Buzz linked to but the system left "vast swaths of the Web" out of its service. That kept Yahoo from linking to "some really awesome content," and it limited the number of publishers who could benefit from additional traffic driven by the site, Yahoo explained.

"Now that benefit can come to any site online, making it possible to give as much visibility to extraordinary content from an obscure site as major news stories from big publishers," Tapan Bhat, SVP of Front Doors, Communities and Network Services for Yahoo, said in his Monday blog post.

Yahoo Buzz searches for the most popular topics on the Internet and lists the hottest stories on those topics. Voting and e-mail sharing help determine rankings, in a way that's similar to Digg and Reddit. The most popular stories make it to the Yahoo homepage.

Yahoo launched Buzz in February with 100 publishing partners. It now boasts more than 5 million users. It features news stories, gossip, photos, and video.

As part of the change, all sites can now add a "Buzz Up" button that allows readers to select their content for Yahoo Buzz. Users who want to submit content from pages that lack the button can submit them directly on Yahoo Buzz.

A "My Buzz Activity" page allows users to track and share what they have buzzed up and down.