Wired on Friday: Netscape.com was one of the original "portals" - a term that will go down in infamy as one of the doomed business plans of the original web boom.
When their web browser and server retail business didn't pull in the kinds of revenue that the company's burn rate required, the maker of the first popular web browser tried to monetise their website.
It was hard in those times to attract advertising revenue to all but the most glamourous websites. Netscape had the ingenious advantage, however, of being the default start-up page of Netscape web browsers.
Most users did not change those factory settings, so Netscape's homepage gathered millions of hits a day. In other words, it was one of the few websites to have an actual audience - a largely captive audience, in fact. To keep the users there - or to create "sticky eyeballs", another phrase of the decade - Netscape offered news, commentary, and other content brought in from other companies such as the New York Times and CBS.
Despite their best efforts, Netscape's audience slowly leaked away, undermined by the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Netscape was bought by AOL, which attempted to reinvigorate Netscape.com with a few inept co-brandings.
Time passed; new exciting buzzwords of the web emerged to tempt venture capital and revenue-seeking Silicon Valley desperadoes. AOL tasked web veteran Jason Calacanis, hired when AOL bought up his network of bloggers, to relaunch Netscape.com. Calacanis chose the most cutting-edge, most dangerously hip way of creatively reinventing a simple news portal. He took a vote.
Lots of votes, in fact. Netscape's new look might be described as a radical democracy of news. Readers get to vote on what should be the headlined stories; they are encouraged to vote early and often, to seek out stories they'd like to recommend to the site, and comment vociferously on the results.
It's all part of what the innovators on the web describe as user-generated content - a way of taking advantage of the two-way nature of the web. In the words of media critic Jason Rosen, the audience has become "the people formerly known as the audience"; now it's part of the process of creating the news.
Or at least that's how it works in the most successful user-generated sites. The new Netscape.com homepage owes most to Digg.com, a phenomenally successful geek site that pioneered the votes-for-headlines technique. But are Netscape.com's current audience willing to become their own, massively distributed editorial team? The number of votes on top stories is remarkably small compared to the readership Netscape.com still possesses.
And some of those stalwarts are rather more determined to become another kind of "former audience".
"When I first saw the new beta page, I had every intention of finding a new home page," said one old-time Netscape user.
"I don't want other people voting on what I should read first. I want to see major national news stories," said another.
Taking the user-generated model from the niches it has currently occupied to the mass market of Netscape.com may prove to be more of a challenge than simply rewiring a smaller site to face a bigger audience.
One doesn't need a marketing survey to tell that the Netscape readership is pretty resistant to change - after all, a majority of them neither changed browser nor home page for over five years now. Many of them have come to Netscape.com every day to passively read, not be expected to participate. It's perhaps no surprise that they have reacted as though their favourite quiet pub has become a karaoke bar.
But could Netscape's democracy win them over? Digg.com traditionally concentrated on technology news but has recently branched out into the wider news cycle and has had some stumbling blocks itself. The discussion wars over whether Apple is better than Linux is one thing, but when you're talking about, say, the Israel and Palestinian situation, user-generated discussion can rapidly spiral into tastelessness. And with bigger audiences comes even greater attention-seeking behaviour. Idle pranksters love to "troll" Digg-like sites. This is an antisocial practice that involves deliberately taunting readers or ballot-stuffing the voting mechanism.
The frisson of doing so in front of an audience of staid mid-westerners or grandmothers will make the new Netscape a terribly appealing target. When the LA Times opened its editorial pages to random net passersby, the resulting pile-on was predictable to everyone, it seems, but the LA Times.
Within the first few hours of Netscape.com launching, it was not unexpected that the top headlines were mostly pages critical of the site redesign, voted up by entertained Digg.com visitors. Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands of more passive audience members looked on confusedly.
Still, perhaps time will be kinder to Netscape's new design than these first reactions, and dire predictions, indicate.
Truthfully, time has been generous to Netscape's original plans: advertisements wrapped around compelling content remain the revenue opportunity for most websites (albeit cheaper ones to produce than Netscape.com 1.0); the original system Netscape designed for pulling in foreign content has morphed into "RSS", a system used from the BBC to the White House for syndicating content.
RSS is about as geeky an approach to browsing the web as one might imagine, yet its utility has led to mainstream web use and adoption.
Will audience-driven websites make the same migration? Changing Netscape's website took a few weeks; changing the "former audience" may take a little longer.
Advertising, and AOL's experiment, depend on ratings, not on-screen tallies. We'll see who votes with their clicks in a few months' time.
Danny O'Brien is activism co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
