I am put off by the article's title, but otherwise Alan makes some good points: I would prefer that Buzz not show the number of new items. I have been using Buzz like I use Twitter: about 10 minutes a day (each) to take a quick look for interesting things to read. I'm enjoying Buzz, and as long as it is easy to completely disable it I don't think that people have much to complain about.

BTW, a little off topic but: how difficult is it really to remove duplicate entries in Google Reader and similar aggregators? Even better: recognize which articles are original and which are just summaries with a link to the original article. Eliminate duplicates, favoring original articles. (Seems like NGRAMS or comparing word count statistics might do the trick.)