So you may have heard that Yahoo! snapped up BuzzTracker, a rather small potato in a field of news/blog aggregators, for a cool $5 million dollars. The details can be found courtesy of Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.com over here.

Like Mat Ingram, I haven’t paid anything but a cursory look at BuzzTracker because it just doesn’t serve me as well as other meme trackers, namely Techmeme. Furthermore, its layout isn’t as dense (or concise, if you will), leading to pages and pages of endless scrolling. And that’s besides the comment spam that’s left behind some well-meaning (or not) BuzzTracker employees/evangelists/new media graffiti artists.

What *is* kind of interesting, however, is the announcement that Buzztracker *will* introduce one thing that other meme/news trackers *don’t* have. Yeah, I’m talking about Techmeme, Megite, Tailrank, (but not my new favourite news aggregator, see my next post).

And that’s a layer of discussion and community right over the daily topics.

I think this is a very good — and smart — thing for BuzzTracker, because it will allow BuzzTracker to directly host conversations, rather than, for example, readers being ‘forced’ to leave comments on respective blogs. Because, let’s face it — not everyone blogs.

By doing this, it can actively cultivate and “own” a proper community of readers in a way that none of the other news aggregators are actively doing.

Furthermore, it makes total sense when you consider what kind of jolt it will get just by being part of the Yahoo! family — and that readers from Yahoo! will precisely be the kind of people who might participate on news topics. Casual ones, without necessarily wanting to read blogs, or, who might not own a blog.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it will have the benefit of getting the trickle down traffic from the parent company to power these conversations.  Because let’s face it — having no discussions when its an offered feature is probably worse than having no discussion feature at all.