Dallasnews.com starts buzzing

From Jennifer Okamoto, who led the charge on this:

Starting today on dallasnews.com, readers can vote for the most interesting stories of the moment as part of a partnership with Yahoo.

The Dallas Morning News is contributing to Buzz, Yahoo’s newly launched social news site. It pulls feeds from 100 sources, including newspapers, blogs and magazines and ranks their stories based on readers’ votes, searches and forwarded e-mails.

Look for the Yahoo ! Buzz button on each story on the site to vote for an article and see how it ranks among other stories online today. Stories with the highest Buzz score may be displayed on the Yahoo.com home page.

Buzz is similar to another popular recommendation tool, Digg. Users can “Digg” a story on dallasnews.com by clicking the “Bookmark” link.

DISD Blog update from Kent Fischer

Kent Fischer reports progress knitting together a network in his note to Beat Blogging: The Network is Working - Next Question: How to Automate It.  But he points out one key issue.

The network exists, but you wouldn’t necessarily see it from just reading the blog because our primary communication thus far is via an e-mail discussion group.

As Beat Blogging coordinator David Cohn notes, "This method works - and is very personal. But it doesn't scale (if he wanted to grow the network) and it only adds more work to his growing load."