First Look: Netscape's Hybrid Journalism Site
Netscape is back baby and in a big way.
CNET reports America Online, lead by the team behind its recent Weblogs Inc. acquisition, has launched a brand new version of the venerable Netscape.com. The site is a hybrid. It pulls together a mix of citizen-powered news - where users recommend and rank their top choices for news stories - and traditional editor-selected stories.
Netscape is going far and wide with this launch. The new site covers everything from art and design to religion to sex, sports and more. Each vertical has a paid anchor who basically serve as community managers. They provide further context and even host 24/7 chats with users! Each vertical carries RSS, a real-time view of submitted news, and tags too, making it easier for readers to find relevant content.
The new Netscape.com is a winner. It brings together the best of the old world and the new to create a new media model for the 21st century. Whether it succeeds or fails in pulling in users from other sites like digg is irrelevant. AOL will put massive marketing dollars behind this to attract users not to mention advertisers. It is also extremely refreshing to see AOL breath new life into the Netscape brand in such a meaningful way. Kudos to Jason Calacanis and team on this new endeavor. When you look at this site, Blogging Stocks, AIM's new social networking community, AOL Video and the new My AOL, the grand daddy of the Internet is back and in a big way.
Some screens from the new site...
Technorati Tags: AOL, digg, Jason Calacanis, Netscape, Netscape.com
Have you seen this site yet?
http://www.marktd.com
A digg-type site for marketers.
Pretty cool.
Posted by: Stephen | Thursday, June 15, 2006 at 06:42 AM
It's using frames. It's actually framing content. This after years of having to add JavaScript to pages to prevent this copyright violation and content theft. Now we have to do this all over again because AOL steals content.
Someone somewhere really mucked up on this one.
Posted by: Shelley | Thursday, June 15, 2006 at 09:53 AM
"Each vertical has a paid anchor who basically serve as community managers. They provide further context and even host 24/7 chats with users!"
Oh, I get it. It's About.com...
Posted by: Mike | Thursday, June 15, 2006 at 11:42 AM
It is a blend of Slashdot and Digg. The live person manager may be a double edged sword. It is like saying you can vote, but we will decide whether we will take your votes seriously.
They have no personalized features for individual users.
Diggol http://diggol.com just launched with automatic discovery of topics important to each user, personalized ranking, a TopicMap graph showing topics and relations among topics, and the news pages are complete ad-free.
Posted by: Paul Young | Thursday, June 15, 2006 at 12:33 PM
I think, other than Shelley's very big concern (it needs to be addressed), that the service looks to be off to a successful start.
It's great seeing editors working in the open with the community to determine what stories are highlighted, and then doing follow-up in some instances.
Framing content, however, is a very bad practice.
Posted by: Karl | Thursday, June 15, 2006 at 05:02 PM