Bloggers have relied on aggregators like Digg and Mixx to drive traffic to their sites but Yahoo! has a similar product in beta that could catapult the social media into the main stream. It’s called Yahoo! Buzz.

For a quick review: these aggregators allow users to post links to articles from around the web. If the articles get positive votes, they are elevated in ranks and can appear on the home page. This makes it easy for viewers to find them and helps viewers identify with articles are worth reading.

Sites like Digg and Mixx have been working hard to get a mainstream audience but have only made small inroads. What Yahoo! brings to the table is the audience. They already have an audience. By building these tools they will propel small blogs, forum posts, and unheard of websites to the forefront. This will make it possible for articles all over the web to get much more attention.

ReadWriteWeb gives us a few stats from the Yahoo! Buzz beta:

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I’ve been invited and have joined the TechDirt insight community. It’s an interesting approach to crowdsourcing. Members of the Insight Community are given cases (topics to write about) and each case has it’s own payment associated with it. In some instances, you are the exclusive author on a topic but on “challenge cases” your response competes with others. Once you contribute an article on a topic, you can participate in discussion with others responding on the topic.

The format is simple and straight forward. I wasn’t overly impressed by the technology but I’d say the experience was good. I can see a lot of benefit for companies using this as a resource. It’s a great way to get a few professional opinions on a topic. Although there hasn’t been a lot of discussion around my current case, the opportunity for professional discussion is tremendous.