Yahoo! Buzz Launches in India

Signifying the growing importance of India as a market for Internet giants like Yahoo and Google, the following release talks about, Yahoo's launch of Buzz for the first time in India market.

Press Release:

Yahoo! India today announced the launch of Yahoo! Buzz in India (buzz.yahoo.in). Yahoo! Buzz enables people to vote (by “buzzing up”) and comment on the stories they find most remarkable in order to help shape the headlines on Yahoo!’s homepage and beyond. With Yahoo! Buzz, people can discover and share the most interesting content (images, videos and articles) from across the Web.

Following the success of Yahoo! Buzz in the U.S., India is the first international market to launch this product. Yahoo! Buzz measures votes and search patterns from its community to identify interesting and timely stories from large news sources as well as niche blogs around the Web.

Yahoo! Buzz helps Yahoo! understand people’s interests and enhance the relevance of content on India’s #1 online destination, www.yahoo.in, and helps publishers deliver their best content to Yahoo!’s broad and diverse audience.

“Yahoo! Buzz is a great example of how we can combine popular stories with the wisdom of real people to determine what is most engaging and relevant to our millions of users,” said Frazier Miller, Head of Audience, Yahoo! India.

Yahoo! Buzz in India already features content from more than two dozen publishers, including NDTV, India Today Group, Times of India, Zee, A2 Media and One India. Any online publisher can place a Yahoo! Buzz button on their content pages, enabling readers to share and vote (“buzz-up”) stories.

Content from over 20,000 publishers worldwide has been submitted to Yahoo! Buzz since it launched in the U.S. last year, making it one of the most comprehensive places to discover remarkable content from across the Web. Yahoo! Buzz enables all of these publishers to tap into Yahoo!’s broad reach and diverse audience of more than 500 million users and possibly receive site traffic from the Yahoo.com homepage.

India Elections with Google, Yahoo, and Internet

Close to the heels of yahoo, google has also announced the launch of a website for Indian elections. This truly goes on to show, that elections like cricket, is becoming a good tool of monetization, for a lot of companies, with Internet brands like Yahoo and google, leading the flock. And why not, if we look at the kind of money being pumped in by political parties, unofficially people say that a single general election entails spending to the tune of whopping USD 2-4 Billion.
Online campaigning with social media, blogs, twitters, is truly the hall mark of this general election, heralding a new era of campaigning, aimed at targeting the "youths" and other people, for who, Internet is a way of life and primary source for gathering information.
Obama's election campaign can be seen as a watershed in the usage of web in political campaigns. Well, it would be unfair to compare in anyways, US with India in terms of Internet, defining users opinion, but still, in times to come, this medium, will be an integral part of all political campaigns.
I would not be surprised to see all our representatives having a blog address, on their cards, and rustic MLA's and MP's taking a lesson or two on Internet and its nuances.



This could be a good business model for budding entrepreneurs, to start up consultancy and Internet political advisory firms. The target audience will never be bereft of cash:)