June 17, 2006

Some discussion over on ReadWrite Web on the new Netscape front-page.

My thoughts. Clearly it's not as bottom-up as Digg. But it's sure as hell more interesting than the previous incarnation of Netscape. Calacanis seems to be a smart guy who's pushing AOL in the right direction. Let's face it, when was the last time anyone talked about Netscape?

It's also worth comparing digg.com with something like slashdot.org, which has a fanatical community but is editor driven.

In fact, there seems to be a lot of cross-over between the Slashdot and Digg crowds, which suggest that the editorial-driven approach and the mob-driven are complementing each other rather than mutually exclusive rivals. If that's so, it's not hard to imagine that such a complementary mix might work within a particular site too. It's going to be worth experimenting with, at the very least.

2 comments:

chad said...

The big newspapers like NYT, Journal, etc., will have to adopt some variation of the new beta.netscape.com model...its actually a perfect mix between user contributions and editor-driven content. I'm constantly amazed at how primitaive newspaper creation tools are.

Composing said...

Agreed. Although I'm not sure it's the lack of tools holding back the MSM. I suspect it's more a deep culture shock for them to learn to trust the readers.

I also have to say I'm more and more impressed by Calacanis since I've been hearing him on the Gillmor Gang. He's definitely clued in. And he's now pretty much the "hero-blogger" of AOL; its public face and the guy who's essentially saved it from irrelevancy.