In February, we introduced Yahoo! Buzz as a new way for you to discover, vote for, and share the content and stories that matter most to you. You also got a say in what stories might be read by millions, with the voting power to potentially get your favorite content on the Yahoo! Front Page.

Today, six months and more than 5 million users later, we’re pleased to share that we’re opening Yahoo! Buzz up so that you can “buzz up” content from any publisher on the Web.

We started with about 100 publishing partners, which quickly grew to more than 400. Sites like Salon.com and GigaOm immediately saw an impact as their traffic soared when content climbed up the list and got selected for Yahoo.com. 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.

What does this mean for you? Anything you find on the Web is now buzzable. Any of the Web’s best current event stories, gossip, photos, videos and more can be submitted and shared on Yahoo! Buzz. You’ve already seen the “Buzz Up” buttons on many of your favorite sites, including New York Times, Us Weekly and BoingBoing. Now, as any site is able to add our button, you’ll have even more places to buzz to your heart’s content. And if you don’t see that button on a Web story you just have to share, you can submit a story right on Yahoo! Buzz. Like always, the more unique and compelling the story, the better chance your story of choice will buzz up to the Yahoo! homepage. Nice!

And for anyone publishing Web content that was not part of our beta testing, today we hope you will join Yahoo! Buzz and let our audience (of more then half a billion people!) buzz up your content, too. Joining is as simple. Just grab code from our Buttons page and paste it into your website or blog.

Thank you for continuing to make Yahoo! the place you start your day to find and share the most popular stories and videos on the Internet. We have more to come for Buzz, so stay tuned. But in the meantime: keep on buzzing!

Tapan Bhat
Senior Vice President of Front Doors, Communities and Network Services

P.S. Now that you have a Web full of info to buzz, check out the My Buzz Activity page that allows you to keep track of and share what you’ve buzzed up or down, or what you buzzed before anyone else did.