Read/Write Web points to some interesting data from Comscore showing that Yahoo! Buzz is surpassing Digg in traffic, engagement, and also has a more balanced demographic.

First, I’d say to never trust just one statistics service, but it is safe to say that it looks like Yahoo! Buzz is a winner thus far in it’s growth and shows what Yahoo! can do with it’s audience when they execute something well. Buzz is probably far from Digg in being a known brand in the “social news” space, but does that matter if you’re introducing social news to the rest of the internet beyond the technology elite?

I was a little premature back in April, because it takes some time for acquisitions of this size to go through, but Yahoo! has now completed the acquisition of Right Media.
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Yahoo! has announced the upcoming launch of a new display advertising ad type called SmartAds.

SmartAds allows agencies and advertisers to create an ad template that has “variables” in the data that can be changed depending on the user’s information. So, if you’re located in Los Angeles, you may get an ad that talks about great flight deals leaving Los Angeles in the ad. It essentially allows display ads to offer more relevance to users, which is always a good thing. Both users and advertisers should benefit from this.

It will be rolled out with a few airline advertisers first, and then hit more industries over the year.

UPDATE:

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 offers the best analysis of the SmartAds announcement I’ve seen thus far.

Thomas Hawk reports on it, and it’s very cool and adds a ton of relevancy to Yahoo! Image Search. In the past when searching for images I’ve usually had to try searching Flickr directly and then also using Yahoo! or Google image search. Now it can be done in one place. The Flickr acquisition is turning out to be a great one for Yahoo!.