netscape - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

AOL has launched 'Propeller', a new social news site, only a few days after moving Digg-rival Netscape to a more traditional model.

Netscape is now being refashoned as a ‘traditional’ news service - a move AOL said would allow it to fit in better with perceptions of the historic Netscape brand.

Hmmm, doesn't sound quite right, does it? AOL must have had an inkling about this sort of thing 15 months ago, when it was preparing to relaunch Netscape as - give or take - a Digg clone.

Calacanis-flavoured rumours doing the rounds in the blogosphere suggest that some of Digg's top posters have been paid, or offered payment, by PR firms.

He may have resigned from his position at Netscape, but Jason Calacanis is still keeping an eye on events surrounding Digg. He reports in his blog that a number of Digg's top 50 users are on the payroll of a leading (unnamed, of course) PR firm.

Philip Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped has an interesting / outrageous article about Digg’s use of moderators – it seems that Digg has them, but is rather coy about admitting it.

Contrary to the approach favoured by Jason Calcanis at Netscape, Digg has always prided itself on being entirely user-driven, claiming that everything on the site is submitted and managed by the community.

Yet this is not remotely accurate...

Wow… all change at AOL, where CEO Jonathan Miller was this week fired, as the news comes in that Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis is also stepping down, seemingly in protest of Miller’s firing.

Jason Calacanis has announced the hiring of more Netscape ‘Navigators’, and revealed he may spend up to $2.4m a year on more user-generated content for the bookmarking site.

Netscape now employs 23 of these navigators on what Calacanis calls a ‘very part-time’ basis, paying them $12,000 a year each to submit stories, lead discussions and generally do housekeeping tasks, such as closing down duplicate stories and eliminating spam comments.

Netscape is back, only this time it looks a lot like Digg.com, the social news aggregator that allows readers to submit and vote on news stories. The more votes, the more likely a story appears at the top of the list.