Yahoo! announced Tuesday that its Buzz story ratings service is now available to the general public. In February’2008, they introduced Yahoo! Buzz as a new way for you to discover, vote for, and share the content and stories that matter most to you.

We started with about 100 publishing partners, which quickly grew to more than 400. Sites like Salon.com and GigaOm immediately saw an impact as their traffic soared when content climbed up the list and got selected for Yahoo.com. Now that benefit can come to any site online, making it possible to give as much visibility to extraordinary content from an obscure site as major news stories from big publishers. said by Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of front doors, communities, and network services at Yahoo.

Anything you find on the Web is now buzzable. Any of the Web’s best current event stories, gossip, photos, videos and more can be submitted and shared on Yahoo! Buzz. You’ve already seen the “Buzz Up” buttons on many of your favorite sites, including New York Times, Us Weekly and BoingBoing. Now, as any site is able to add “Buzz” button, you’ll have even more places to buzz to your heart’s content. And if you don’t see that button on a Web story you just have to share, you can submit a story right on Yahoo! Buzz.

TechCrunch bragged that a Yahoo! link caused their highest traffic day ever, and comScore reported in May that Yahoo! Buzz overtook Digg in terms of unique visitors and was pulling in more mainstream traffic.

Joining is as simple. Just grab code from their Buttons page and paste it into your website or blog.