Six months after Yahoo Buzz was first introduced and more than 5 million users later, Yahoo announced the public availability of its voting service, which now involves over 400 publishing partners. Yahoo Buzz allows users to vote for, and share their favorite web content and stories with millions of other people.

The stories with the largest number of votes make it to Yahoo’s front page, where they can be read by millions of users. Furthermore, Yahoo.com will turn into a publicity boost for sites' whose traffic may soar with the help of Yahoo Buzz, which transforms even the most obscure stories into front page content.

Everything depends on the users and their preferences: “anything you find on the web is now buzzable,” said Yahoo. Everything from stories, to pictures, videos and much more can be submitted and shared on Yahoo Buzz.

As for web content publishers that were not part of the Yahoo Buzz beta testing, the company said they now have the chance to join the new service and add a Buzz Up button to their websites or blogs. This way, their content could reach to more than half a billion people.

Yahoo Buzz was launched in February this year, as an Internet voting service similar to Digg, which allows users to bring their favorite content to Yahoo’s homepage. The service came out of Yahoo’s desire to allow its users to contribute to the Yahoo front page, rather than to simply rank things.

“Yahoo is a good example of how we are continuing to innovate and open up our key starting points to third party publishers, making Yahoo more social and personally relevant for our half a billion consumers,” Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Network Division, said at the time.