Yesterday, Yahoo announced that the Buzz, which has been in beta testing since February is now opened to everyone. In case you don’t know, Buzz is a Digg-like service, that allows user to submit their favorite stories. And yes, that also means that this is most recent social news club member and a possible traffic source for your blog.

So far, from what I’ve seen, the networking part is much weaker than Digg’s. You can’t add friends, share stories with them, etc. But the Buzz’s main attraction is the fact that if the story is good, you could be featured on the front page of Yahoo. Yup, that’s right. You’re site will have a link from the world’s most visited website, according to Alexa.

But are things this easy? Of course not. Don’t imagine that you’ll submit your story to Buzz, get a few friends to vote and then you’ll get thousands of visitors. Here are a few reasons I don’t think the Buzz will work for small publishers. First of all, the service has editors that manually accept or deny the stories, so you’d have to come with a really, really good stroy. Then you have to consider another aspect. When one of their story got front paged, TechCrunch recorded their highest traffic day, but their servers almost snapped. And imagine that TechCrunch doesn’t have a shared hosting account, they have some very powerful servers. Small blogs usually collapse from the Digg effect, which means a few tens of thousands of visitors. Imagine what 800,000 visitors will do to your server.

Probably if they’ll setup a system where they also can send medium traffic, a few thousands visitors, then it will become a pretty powerful traffic source. But until then, I think the Buzz is worthless for small and medium publishers. Of course, I don’t have a clue on how exactly it works now, but everyone is testing right now, so we should have the first important reports soon.