Netscape, the one-time market-leading web browser now owned by Time Warner’s AOL unit, has been reborn as an interactive news site. The move comes as AOL looks to move away from its struggling internet access business by building web sites that can carry advertising.
The service, launched today as a beta - or test - project, ranks articles according to their popularity, measured in part in terms of user votes. As such it aims be emulate sites such as digg.com, which has built up a cult following among users who use similar methods to rank content from both conventional news sources and bloggers.
“The fact that AOL is launching the new service under the Netscape brand instead of building out a new property says how serious they are about the space,” said the Techcrunch blog, the first to report on the Netscape’s new incarnation.
To try to combat the “mob mentality” that sometimes overtakes sites such as digg, the Netscape site relies on a blend of factors - including editorial judgement - to rank stories.
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Netscape’s eight editorial staff - dubbed “anchors” - will highlight stories they deem important. They will also write fresh copy designed to encourage reader participation, a process Netscape calls “meta-journalism”.
Netscape teams will also travel to news events with video crews, acting on tip-offs from the public.
“What we’re doing with Netscape is [looking for] ... an editorial voice to balance the hive mind. Our anchors are the balance to the limitations of the crowd--and vice versa,” Jason Calacanis, the dot-com entrepreneur behind the new site, wrote on the Netscape Beta blog.
However, signalling how old media companies such as Time Warner risk surrendering content when they embrace the latest web trends, the top article on the new Netscape site this afternoon was a piece titled “AOL copies Digg” - which pointed towards the rival service.
The venture marks a revival of one of the internet’s pioneer brands. Netscape was once the world’s leading internet browser but was crushed when Microsoft gave away its rival Internet Explorer product for free with copies of the near-ubiquitous Windows operating system.
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The brand was bought in 1999 by AOL, which became a unit of Time Warner following AOL’s disastrous takeover of the media giant at the height of the dot-com boom. It became an internet portal and a internet access provider.
Last year Google bought a 5 per cent stake in AOL for $1 billion.
The project also marks a new a new chapter in the career of Mr Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs Inc, which he sold to AOL for $25 million last year.
He made his name as the publisher of Silicon Alley Reporter, a magazine that reported on the internet scene in the 1990s and later founded Engadget.com, the popular technology blog.
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Even though it languishes behind the internet’s most popular sites, a field led by Yahoo.com, Netscape records around 811 million monthly page views, far ahead of digg, at around 200 million a month
Techcrunch noted that small sites propelled to the top of the Netscape page could collapse under the weight of traffic sent to them.
“A digg or Slashdot story can send tens of thousands of visitors to a site in a matter of minutes or hours. With Netscape, this effect could be many times larger - possibly resulting in outages at sites headlining the new service,” it said.