New Netscape Taps the Wisdom of Crowds

In an attempt to revive the flagging Netscape brand, AOL has begun to turn the Netscape portal page into a news site where users submit and vote on news stories and editors provide direction.

Although Netscape remains a popular brand, its visibility has shrunk over the last few years. The site had 11.4 million users in May, down from 15.4 million a year earlier.

In its latest incarnation, Netscape is a hybrid news site combining elements of traditional editor-driven news and user-submitted stories. Users vote for stories and for other users, and the most popular stories percolate to the top of each category page.

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The site is also hosted by eight “anchors,” who choose the sites main stories and comment on them. AOL is also employing 15 part-time specialists to help fact check some stories.

The decision to retain some editorial control over the site is likely a way for AOL to use social media tools without risking some of the dangers of crowd-driven news. The editor-driven policy is also likely to sit well with advertisers.

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The new Netscape is driven by Jason Calacanis, who sold his company Weblogs, Inc. to AOL last year for a reported $25 million.

AOL bought Netscape for $4.2 billion in 1999. Months later AOL merged with Time Warner in a deal valued at $165 billion. When the deal was made, the two companies had a combined market cap of $350 billion. Time Warners value today is only about $71 billion.

AOL is also working on a social networking site called AIM Pages, which will compete with sites like MySpace and Facebook.

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