Social bookmarking in the UK: Yahoo not yet buzzing

It’s rarely said but often found in website statistics: for many UK websites, social bookmarking sites such as Digg are extremely poor sources of traffic. That’s because they tend to be dominated by users who are (a) American and (b) interested in technology and humour. If your site is aimed at other audiences and has other content, it suffers as a result.

The categories used on many social bookmarking sites highlights just how American-focused they are with “politics”, for example, being used a synonym for “American politics”. That’s fair enough – if you’re only really interested in an American audience.

So the news that Yahoo was launching a British version of its Buzz social bookmarking service particularly caught my attention. A system aimed at British readers and content would give stories the chance to rise to the top in a way that they often don’t on American dominated sites. Its appeal is similar to that of the LibDig social bookmarking service (aimed at Liberal Democrat members and supporters): a user-baser that is more similar (but not too similar) to me should throw up more content of interest to me.

Unfortunately though so far Yahoo Buzz UK isn’t exactly buzzing. At time of writing, the top story in the Today’s Buzz column on http://uk.buzz.yahoo.com [now defunct] has all of two votes. That’s relatively good going though, as the other fourteen stories on the front page have a grand total of one vote between them. The top fifteen stories in Up & Coming do a bit better, with 22 votes between them. After 10 minutes hunting round, I found one story with 19 votes, but that’s the maximum I found on my travels.

In addition to low usage, the site looks to have some technical problems. I submitted one story via the Shareaholic browser plugin which seems to have gone in under my profile name, but in to the US version of the site. Therefore I can’t submit the story again, but nor does it appear under my activity if I log-in to the UK version. It’s half integrated, half not. Prompts to make you submit new content and offers of toolbar buttons etc. are also thin on the ground at the moment.

Conclusion? Nice idea, would love it to work, but so far it’s not got any buzz going.