The goal of the new Netscape is to create a social news site where the audience builds the front page, and our “anchors” do metajournalism on the stories they vote up. We’ve learned that it takes a lot of time to just manage one of these sites with all the spam, gaming, duplicate stories, and images. As a results of this we are adding a dedicated image editor and we’re empowering our Navigators to do much of the policing (they are experts on policing since they live on the site).

The result is our anchors can spend more time on meta-journalism, or metaj as we referrer to it internally. This is a new style of journalism as we’ve all discussed here before, and it is based on things like followup interviews and adding context.

When you see the anchor icon ( ) next to a headline that means you should click on the headline to see what the Anchors have added to the story. The goal here is follow up on, and expand, the coverage in the story. We’re not trying to control anything, but rather act as servants to the users. They voted the story up, and because they voted it to the homepage we know they would like more information about the story–who wouldn’t want more details?

Here are some examples of note:

• CK Sample Karina gave a bunch of history to a video clip from the film Outfoxed, incorporate five followup links, and he syndicated the video from YouTube to Netscape to save people from having to leave the page. The links and data points he gives in his commentary would take a user 15-20 minutes of research to find. So, people were interested enough in this clip to vote it up, and now we are giving them additional information that the original poster did not share. The result? A more educated public in less time–that’s big.
• Fabienne gave some educational feedback, and added “Op-ed” to the title of this negative story about President Bush. She explains to people that Netscape, as a social news site, is not right or left. Anyone can vote a story up, and if the right folks don’t like this story they should post their own story and vote it up. Educating our user base on how social news works is a HUGE part of what we’re doing right now. Folks in the web 2.0 world have been using delicious, digg, and slashdot for years so they instantly understand the dynamics around voting and submitting. However, the mass audience is very confused by this concept and it takes three or four “touches” for the average person to get their head around the dynamics. Over the past 60 days we’ve gotten 50,000 folks to register for the site, and they are getting it in a big way.
• Dakota–who is a meta-J machine, did excellent follow up to this “megadeath angry at the United Nations” story. What Dakota does better than anyone is pick up the phone! It’s amazing what you can get done if you call people on the phone and ask for their feedback. Dakota’s metaj is in many cases *more* interesting then the original story. I can’t say enough about what a great job she is doing finding people to comment on stories.
• Karina is the master of giving context, and is really breaking out as a star anchor at Netscape. Here she gives context on the whole Tom Cruise gets dumped story. She’s also been working with our very talented preditor (video producer/editor), Alexia, on Netscape At The Movies series of videos.
• Speaking of Alexia, she’s also great at PICKING UP THE PHONE (I love when people pick up the phone :-), like in this example.
• Ryan has been doing great Op-Eds, like this one on who SHOULD leave SNL. This is a great riff on the whole “who’s leaving SNL” thread that spread. I like the way he turns around the meme and takes it to another place. Although, I’m finding that Op-Eds don’t see to be that big of a bang for our metaj buck. We’ve got a large audience with opinions, and they post them in the comments, so I’m thinking that if Anchors take the time to followup on a story they should focus on data, interviews, context, and other hard points. It sort of feels unfair that we get to put our opinion above the users below, while us putting data/research/interviews up top doesn’t seem unfair. Does that make sense?
• Eliot, an Anchor who got his start on HackADay and Engadget, is a machine at going to events. This type of first person coverage–complete with videos and photos, is just invaluable. Here is another example.

What do you guys think of metaj?

What are we doing well, what can we do better?

Are there any example in MSM that you think we could follow to enhance what we’re doing (I always refer to the update segment on 60 Minutes–perhaps we should do “#1 story last month followup”)?

Clearly we’re on to something with this concept because Netscape members are loving it, I’m just trying to figure out what the “best practices” will be. I guess in some ways we’re definning that since there really aren’t many examples of metaj out there. What do you think Jeff? Fred? Om? Rafat? Jim? Mark? Nick? Steve? Scoble? Dave? Mike?

Site-based mail is really taking off on Netscape.

Andy created a slick new feature that puts a temporary alert on the top page of you site (a la Flickr alerts, which I’ve always loved) when you get a new message. The note closes after you check the message or click the close link.

I’ve been begging various product managers to start blogs at AOL, and many have started. Some folks I talk to at AOL–and other companies–tell me they don’t have the time to blog.
Great point about blogging every day Ryan. It’s true, you need to be out there on a regular basis.

Here is what I say to product folks who tell me they don’t have the time to blog:

If you are in the Internet industry and you don’t have time to blog about your product then you should quit. Go home, give up, and find another career. Your competitors are blogging about their products and talking to the market, and there is no way to compete if you don’t engage the discussion. So, by not blogging you basically are giving up and telling the market that you don’t care. That’s the honest truth.

Blog or die!

You can’t compete in the web-development space without a blog any more. Period, end of story.

We are looking for a couple of more developers for our Netscape team. At Weblogs, Inc., Blogsmith, and Netscape we let our team members work from home or at an office (we have a lot of offices at AOL). So, if you are some amazing developer and you left SF, NY, WA, etc. and you’re doing consulting work this might be a great gig for you. All the benefit of living outside the big city, but you get the benefits, salary, and perks of being a f/t staffer. Of course, you have to be willing to travel to our CodeJams and staff meetings, but those are monthly/quarterly typically.

CK has details here: http://www.sampletheweb.com/2006/08/21/netscape-is-looking-for-a-few-good-people/

Wow, blogging has come a long way: Autoblog gets a Bently for review! When are they going to do a Lambo, Ferrari, and Tesla?!?!

Letting talent walk out the door is always a mistake. Seems like the idiots who run Incisive Media just let Shaq (aka Danny Sullivan) walk out the door. They just lost their franchise… Danny will be scooped up in 10 seconds, or do his own thing and make Incisive look like the dolts they clearly are.

Dumb, dumb, dumb…. talent wins. Worship your talent, give them whatever they want, and never let them walk out the door.

Danny speaks here.

I’ve moved to email only interviews (with rare exceptions where I know the journalist and really trust them), and it’s worked out really great for me. Here is an interview with Greg (who I trust), that I did on the subject of email interviews.

I love Mark’s quote: “I don’t ever cede anything… you either know I have a blog when you interview me, or you are a dumbass. If you ask me not to report our exchange on my blog, which has been done, then I decide if I want that protection or not.”

Mark is spot on: how do you interview a blogger and not know and read their blog?! Hello?!

No, I talk to people about it first.

I’ll publish this one on my blog right now, unless you tell me you
want to wait until your story comes out.

best j

Update: My pal Sean Bonner rips on MySpace for page goosing nonsense.
Update2: Make sure you go vote this story on digg! http://digg.com/tech_news/Netscape_Adds_in_Site_Mail

A very large percentage of MySpace traffic comes from the fact that they have site mail. Many young people I talk to don’t use IM any more, they use the slow and ugly version: MySpace site mail. It’s crazy because doing IM on a web page is slow, requiring multiple page loads. However, there is an advantage to it: you don’t need to add anyone to your IM client and you don’t need to download a client.

Anyway, the people have spoken and a large percentage of them love site-based mail/IM.

We’ve added it to the top-level of Netscape today (we’ve been testing it a couple of layers down since the start).

If you go to a story page (permalink page) you will see “Send Message” next to people’s names now (see images below). We have this for both the person who submitted the story and for the people who are commenting.

Also, instead of taking you to another page it pops open a nice little AJAX box so we don’t waste your time. We could have made this take 3-4 pages like MySpace does, but we decided to give up the page views in exchange for the user experience. I hate the fact that MySpace makes you load 3-4 pages to get to your mail–it’s so obvious that they are goosing the page views. This is always a bad idea, because those folks click through the pages super fact and never look–let alone click–on the advertisements. This makes your advertisers upset because they think your site doesn’t perform. It’s a horrible design philosophy.

What do you guys think? Kind of slick huh?

The WashPost did an interesting story on our Netscape Navigators who are getting paid to cool hunt for news stories.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/25/AR2006082501308.html

This is fun… snakes on a plane, dr. who, and sex, sex, sex. Geeks are funny.
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?ns=articles&limit=100&month=08/2006&wiki=enwiki