Blogging phenom, Jason Calacanis, is reinventing Netscape on AOL’s behalf. According to New York Times:
The new Netscape site, which is scheduled to be introduced in a preview version today, is modeled on Digg, 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.
Where Netscape goes beyond Digg is that its staff of eight full-time bloggers, called anchors, will add original material to the accounts that are of most interest to the audience. In some cases they will post commentary, but often they will gather additional facts or conduct interviews.
Live anchor could be a good feature, if they do not manipulate the ranking too much. A big part of Digg’s success comes from many people submitting stories. Their linking scheme does not motivate people submitting stories. Also, there are too ads, even in the center of the comments!
Plus, they do not have personalized pages for individual users. Diggol http://diggol.com just launched with automatic discovery of topics important to each user, personalized ranking, a TopicMap graph showing topics and relations among topics, and the news pages are complete ad-free.