Netscape Relaunched as AOL Digg
AOL and their Savior, Jason Calacanis, have transformed the once Mozilla powered browser, ISP and homepage brand; Netscape, into a wild and whacky multi-tier version of Digg for AOL users. Sure, using the succesful Digg social news sharing, commenting and ranking model for mass AOL news may seem like a questionable idea from the beginning, but it follows the succesful adaptation into social media that Yahoo has directed itself into.
AOL News is the 4th most popular Internet news channel on the web, and the Digg model, which is available for tweaking and customization in the form of multiple open source applications, is a proven success. For as high browed and techie as the Digg audience maybe, at its core Digg is quite a simple web tool. Problem is, as long as the Digg model is being used for tech, engineering and Valley oriented themes; it’s never going to spread onto the browser of the common Internet user.
That is the genius behind AOL’s new Netscape (Beta), it’s Web 2.0 for Bingo Moms, Coupon Clippers, Ford Drivers and Shake & Bake conneisseurs.
Netscape now brings social interactive news to those who will get a kick out of voting, commenting and submitting stories on themes ranging from Cars to Sex, Celebrities to Politics, Pets to Baseball. With the amount of time spent on these sites due to their stickiness, consider AOL’s Netscape to be a media seller’s dream.
Even better, the attraction of Digg to site owners, marketers, and link builders will be even more widespread with Netscape. It is the Digg, or the Fark, for all walks of life. With millions of US bloggers and MySpacers, expect Netscape to catch on as asocial marketing and blog traffic building tool for the other bloggers out there… the 99% who do not write about search engines, TechCrunch, Google or venture capital.
Jason is covering the Netscape Beta launch on his blog, calacanis.com and notes:
Of course, in the first hour of being open we get tested by a bunch of DIGG users who voted up a story about a horrible AOL user experience–to the second position!
We’ve started doing metajournalism on the first wave of stories already… this is a real test of our integrity.
