From the “oh yeah — its that important” department”, Om “GigaOm” Malik reports how beneficial being “buzzed” has been for GigaOm.com.  And of course he’s referring to Yahoo Buzz, which is a social news type of site that was launched some months ago.  Its funny how some news gets lost in the wake of other tech “buzz” (cough, cough FRIENDFEED cough, cough), but Om’s numbers seem to validate the giant deluge in traffic that other sites have noticed.

In fact, in March, Richard MacManus detailed the kind of traffic-licious bounty that many “mainstream” blogs were enjoying thanks to getting Buzzed. 

*  Salon.com reached over 1 million uniques in one day for the first time in the company’s 12-year history, after Yahoo.com linked to one of their highly “buzzed” stories (they issued this press release)

· US Magazine: In part due to a Yahoo.com link, February 27th was the second highest day in overall Usmagazine.com traffic since its launch in June 2006. Referral visits from the Yahoo! homepage accounted for 32% of total visits that day.

· When Yahoo.com linked to one of their stories, The Smoking Gun received approximately 1 million additional page views over their average traffic, with over 275,000 visitors coming from the Yahoo! homepage.

· Portfolio.com (part of Conde Net) received over half a million referral visits from a Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link.

· HuffingtonPost received over 800,000 unique visitors from Yahoo.com in one day.

To other fans of social media, however, the *real* interesting metric wasn’t just the raw levels of hot unadulterated traffic, but also the level of the *engagement* of such traffic.  After all, its been argued (by me) that without engagement, social technologies that push traffic are somewhat questionable in their legitimacy *as* a “social” tool (cough, cough MIXX HAS AN ANEMIC NUMBER OF COMMENTS cough, cough).

To wit, Om says that not only did they get 200,000 additional page views, but that they got over 300 extra comments (!)  This is completely inline with TechCrunch’s experience when they got Buzzed earlier in the year, when they got over 1000 comments on the slowest day of the week, and an almost crippling level of traffic (luckily MediaTemple was girded real strong).

So is is Yahoo Buzz’s strength a new story?  Not really.  But I think its an important one to remember in the social news drama, and particularly every time we think / hear about Digg getting acquired.  By some numbers, for example, Yahoo’s Buzz eclipsed Digg *months* ago in terms of raw traffic it gets.

Perhaps the reason why it never gets as much “buzz” as Digg got is because — as far as I can tell — not just anyone can be included in Yahoo Buzz.  You might get a chance to vote or Buzz up a story … but unlike Digg, or Reddit, or Delicious, or StumbleUpon, users *don’t* get a chance to submit stories — i.e. submit their *own* blogs.

My understanding is that this may change this summer, as people who purchase ads with Yahoo might get a chance to get their stories Buzz’d. 

And if *THAT* gets to happen, you start wondering a) why kind of rush there’ll be to start using Yahoo’s ad service b) if Google would ever consider that for Google Adwords c) if that would dilute Yahoo Buzz’s appeal (or increase it) and d) what implications, if any, it would have for other social news sites.