AOL turns Netscape.com into a Digg clone

June 15, 2006 – 11:52 am

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Danny Sullivan has an interesting article about AOL attempts to turn Netscape into a Digg or Slashdot clone. I agree with his comments about Digg being a snarky community (reading the link to where he was “Dugg” is hilarious. He’s attacked by an angry mob, which isn’t uncommon at Digg.

Looking at the new Netscape interface I’m struck by the fact that it’s slick, but looks almost like something we’ve seen before. It’s similar to Yahoo in a way, but not quite as crisp. I’m not even sure from looking at the first page how the entire article reputation system works.

One hilarious fact is that the top news is “AOL Copies from Digg”. It shows they really don’t care who knows where they got the idea. They did change the word “Digg” to “Vote”, so I’m sure that will be enough. It’s not like Digg actually invented the concept of “online polls” themselves either.

The “click vote” sites are apparently a darling of Web 2.0. How realistic it is to think the internet will support a lot of these types of sites, I have no idea. The “democratic” nature of these sites has already devolved into self-promotions, IMHO, so I doubt it will get much better soon.

What do you think of the new Netscape Site?

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