We’re excited to introduce Yahoo! Buzz, a new way for you to tell us (and the world) what you think is cool, and in the process help make Yahoo.com, the favorite Internet starting point, even better. Yahoo! Buzz uncovers the most interesting and relevant content from websites across the Internet to bring more buzz-worthy stories to the homepage of Yahoo!.

How does this work? You cast your vote on the most interesting Web stories, images or videos about anything and everything – from a late-breaking political story on a major news site, to the coolest photo of the lunar eclipse, to a shocking celebrity gossip blog post that shouldn’t be missed. The best part is that the stories with the highest Buzz Scores – determined by combining your votes with organic search popularity rankings – may be featured on the Yahoo! homepage, giving you the power to influence what millions of people see on Yahoo!.

So whether its the latest Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul banter, the best dressed from the Oscar’s, or a new global report on climate change, tell us what you think is the best of the best on the Web. Make sure to look out for the “Buzz-Up” badges all over Yahoo! and across sites on the Web, or go to buzz.yahoo.com and browse through thousands of stories to vote for your favorites.

Don’t see the “Buzz Up” buttons on your favorite site? Down the road, you’ll be able to submit new things that you think deserve the Buzz, but for now we encourage you to contact the publishers about becoming part of the Buzz network.

And for the publishers reading this, hold tight, as we’ll be opening up Yahoo! Buzz with a new API and syndication and monetization tools just for you. In the meantime get your BUZZ on and start casting your votes!

Tapan Bhat
Vice President of Front Doors and Network Services

Let me start off with a big purple thanks to you, our half a billion users who visit, share, and engage with Yahoo!-branded properties everyday. As you may have read, the new University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index results are in and it’s due to your regular feedback that we continue to make strides in customer satisfaction ratings. On that note, we’d like to take this opportunity to look back at some of our product milestones since last summer that were a result of your direct input.

This summer, we’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of our new home page design for Yahoo.com, which was built completely around your suggestions. You wanted to get through your daily routines faster, so we added quick previews of your email, local weather, and traffic. We also updated our featured content to highlight even more of what’s happening around the world, at a glance, so you could bring your a-game to the water cooler.

You wanted more storage on Yahoo! Mail, so we extended unlimited email storage to all users and took it one step further by enhancing speed and performance and adding integration with Yahoo! Messenger. You asked us to make it easier to find what you’re looking for in one search, and as a result we’ve rolled out new enhancements on Yahoo! Search, such as search suggestions that appear as you type into the search box on Yahoo.com, and shortcuts around popular searches like music artists, hotels, restaurants, and Major League Baseball stars.

And we’re not done! In the next week, we’ll be rolling out more broadly a cool new inline video player on the Yahoo! Home Page, so that you can watch videos without leaving the page, see other related videos, and email or IM interesting videos to your friends.

We’re committed to building products you love and making your experience even better on Yahoo!, so please continue to feed us your suggestions and stay tuned for more to come.

Tapan Bhat
Vice President, Front Doors