The New Netscape

We’ve just opened the beta of the new Netscape.

The goal of the site is to take social bookmarking to the next level: social news. Right now there are dozens of places you can get a list of the top stories of the day: delicious, reddit, digg, furl, and of course the meta site popurls.

These sites are great and I love them. I’m on them all the time, and about six months ago I realized they were missing something–human judgement. Right now stories that are false, half-correct, or out of context make it to the top of social bookmarking sites and it’s up to the users to figure out if they are true or not. Our anchors are going to do that extra little work to finish the story up.

At the New Netscape every story that makes it to the to the top 20 list will be looked at by our team of Anchors and they will do some old-fashioned reporting on it.

You can see some examples of this on the site already including:

a) One of our Anchors giving context on an upcoming movie.
b) One of our Anchors doing a followup interview on an editorial by Jaron Lanier.
c) One of our Anchors doing a followup interview with the manager of a restaurant which was recently reviewed.

These are simple examples, but they show the promise.

It’s not going to solve all the problems, but with a team of eight full-time anchors and a bunch of freelancers I think we can cover the top 20 every day, and that’s a start.