• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 17, 2007

Yahoo late last week acquired software and publishing startup Participate Media and its news aggregation site BuzzTracker.com. Alan Warms, who founded Participate just two years ago, will come onboard as general manager and vice president of Yahoo News.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the rumored selling price for Participate was between $2 million and $5 million. BuzzTracker searches over 90,000 sources--including Web sites and blogs--for news items and organizes them by topic. Participate licenses the software, which ranks content according to its popularity among bloggers, to other publishers.

Warms expressed his desire to aid Yahoo in its "commitment to being more open by bringing the best content from across the web," in a blog post last week.

RealClearPolitics.com, a political news aggregator that Warms previously founded and then sold this year, is a content partner of Yahoo.

Yahoo News features content from dozens of news outlets, including the Associated Press and Reuters, accompanied by its news search tool, which already taps into thousands of news sources.

News aggregators are plentiful online these days, led by startups like TechMeme and Slashdot. In the summer of last year, News Corp. paid a reported $7 million for a similar news aggregation startup named NewRoo.

For all its troubles over the last year, Yahoo continues to dominate the news category, attracting 33.8 million visitors in July, according to comScore Media Metrix.