Series: Netbytes

Take a break, get the latest buzz

If you are bored at work, BuzzFeed aims to lighten your day by picking up the latest virals and other web stories
A grab of the BuzzFeed homepage

BuzzFeed aims to bring you, as it says in its subtitle, "the viral web in realtime". But it's not a bit like Digg. BuzzFeed looks like a cross between a blog and a commercial news site, and it's much easier to read.

Nor is it geeky: it's for what Jonah Peretti, one of the founders, calls "the Bored at Work Network (BWN) – a huge people-powered network with even greater reach than traditional networks like CNN, ABC, or the BBC".

Like most news aggregators, BuzzFeed has separate pages for different topics, and the headings tell you a lot: culture, movies, music, TV, celebrity, style, food, politics, business, sports, science, tech.

The Culture section offers a mixture of stories, images and videos, including things such as Pussy Pop ("The soft drink made with your cat in mind"), Black Canary Barbie, and the RoboCop Rap. Some posts have circular badges that label them Big on Twitter, Trashy!, Geek!, Cute! or whatever. Stories often feature kittens and puppies.

Even the technology section takes a very light view of the topic. Current or recent stories include Make Your Own Ugly Holiday Sweater, Pac-Man Mailboxes, and Typeracer -- Race Against Other Typists!

If you're looking for political or religious insight, computer help or a fight, BuzzFeed is the wrong place. However, if you're in the BWN, you'll certainly find something more amusing than Solitaire.

If you're in a hurry, you can simply hit BuzzFeed's Top20 link for the "most viral" and "most shared" items. If you have lots of time, you can click on Raw for the "raw feed", which shows all the items being picked up and/or submitted. This has stories found minutes or hours ago: it's much fresher than the stuff that has built up a buzz.

BuzzFeed gets material in several ways. Some is picked up by crawling the web, and some is posted by visitors who sign up for accounts. Anybody can paste in a link. BuzzFeed also uses Google, Digg, Reddit, Twitter and many other sites as sources.

And you don't have to go to BuzzFeed to read stories online. As the name suggests, you can sign up for an RSS feed of the home page (which has the main stories) or the raw feed. You can read the feed via an RSS reader, a mail program (such as Windows Live Mail), a desktop widget (Apple Dashboard, Yahoo Desktop etc) or a personal page such as iGoogle.

You can also get BuzzFeed via Twitter (, on your mobile phone ( or as a daily email newsletter.

Anyone with a website can add a BuzzFeed widget that will deliver a few top stories to their pages. One option is: "Only show tame buzz – some of my readers are prudes." That would skip stories such as Barbie Porn, a rude but feeble YouTube video made with Ken and Barbie dolls. (Trashy!)

But a site for the BWN (Bored at Work Network) obviously can't do much that's NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

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