AOL REVAMPS NETSCAPE.COM AS �META-JOURNALISM� SITE (NYT)
By Stephen Saito
The New York Times's Saul Hansell writes about AOL's attempt to turn Netscape.com into an innovative news blog that premieres today, led by former Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis. According to the Times, Netscape.com has dropped from 15.4 million users to 11.4 million users within the past year.
Writes Hansell:
"We want to marry the great editorial skill of humans and what systems and software can do to create something that is different and better," [AOL'S CEO Jonathan] Miller said.
The site is modeled on Digg (www.digg.com), a rapidly growing site focused on technology news. Digg users find items that interest them on news sites, blogs or anywhere else on the Web. They submit links to those items along with short descriptions. Other users then vote on the items, and those that generate the most interest are displayed on the site's home page, without the intervention of editors.
Digg has grown to 8 million users a month from 30,000 over the last year, according to Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg. Next week, Digg will introduce a redesign that will allow it to cover a broader range of topics, including world affairs and business, Mr. Adelson said.
The Netscape.com project will have eight full-time bloggers and a travel budget that will allow them to provide instant access to news events. Meanwhile, AOL has found an intriguing leader for the project in Calacanis, who has openly shared his contempt for the company's corporate structure and interference on his blog.
The Times:
At AOL, Mr. Calacanis thinks of himself as a renegade. His own blog (www.calacanis.com) is frequently critical of AOL's bureaucracy and products. And he boasted that he had built the new Netscape outside the usual AOL procedures. Much of the work was done in a weeklong "code jam" when he assembled a dozen programmers in a suite at a luxury hotel overlooking the beach in Santa Monica, Calif.
"We have a smaller, quicker, lighter organization inside a bigger organization," he said.
Nurturing internal renegades has become something of a trend at Internet companies as they try to compete both with start-ups and the unpredictable colossus Google. Notably, Yahoo has acquired a series of Web sites related to online sharing, including Flickr, del.icio.us and Upcoming, and has tried to keep their management teams and cultures intact in order to push for rapid innovation.
