All is not well in the Netscape.com camp. They are running out of engaging ideas and taking a cue from Digg.com. Social bookmarking is a hot Web 2.0 thing nowadays and instead of just staying online to talk about breaking news, so called "Netscape.com anchors" will rush to the scene of the news to report via online video. Phew ! That's some serious reporting if you ask me. Wonder if the sending a Netscape staff to cover the Volcano Merapi in Indonesia is worth it ? Maybe they will just limit it to local USA based news. Its opened for public testing from now until 1 July 2006. I hope this will bring some life back into Netscape that has seen better light before the dotcom bust and I wished Jason Calacanis would have thought of something more outstanding. But I could be proved wrong....The new Netscape.com, which goes into public beta on Thursday, will complement its "social news" core functionality with features borrowed from social bookmarking services, such as the posting of favorite Web site links, as well as from social networking sites, such as the creation of friends lists, and from video sharing sites, such as letting users upload videos. Users will have multiple options for subscribing to content on the site via RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Netscape.com will also have a staff of "anchors" performing journalistic tasks, such as choosing stories to feature, commenting on articles and doing research and reporting about chosen stories. These staffers are called anchors because their job will be to provide a level of journalistic oversight, steering discussions and molding content, but not editing the featured articles.
"We're basically taking social bookmarking and making it into social news and using meta journalism to do that," said Jason Calacanis, a blogging pioneer who is chief executive officer of Weblogs, an AOL subsidiary.
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