AOL's Digg clone, formerly branded as Netscape and already pronounced dead, will be rebranded as Propeller. The announcement came from Tom Drapeau, the head of AOL's Netscape division since Jason Calacanis's brief tenure. Muhammed Saleem, a Propeller editor né Netscape Scout, thinks technology sites should be eating…
Tom Drapeau, the current head of Netscape at AOL, is finally admitting that Jason Calacanis's jealous attempt to clone Kevin Rose's Digg was a failure. Sort of. Calacanis, who left AOL earlier this year to launch Mahalo, an also-ran Web directory, had hoped to persuade Netscape's loyal but dwindling base of users to…
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's rumor that Netscape would be killed off has proven off the mark. Not because several Netscapers have surfaced to deny the rumors, but because you can't kill something that's already dead. There may be a community that, out of laziness or inertia, still visits its grave daily.…
Jason Calacanis and Kevin Rose, interviewed together on the second episode of the GigaOm Show? Of course, the "fur would fly" — or so hosts Om Malik and Joyce Kim promised. Despite recent photographic evidence of a peace accord, Calacanis did, after all, try to undercut Kevin Rose's Digg social-news site with a…
What on earth could bring together supposed mortal enemies Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis? Why, Om Malik, of course. Rose is the founder of Digg, and Calacanis, the blowhard entrepreneur who created a Digg clone when he was an executive at AOL. But love has conquered all that. First, there's Malik, the cuddly tech…
Marc Andreessen, founder of the software companies Netscape, Opsware, and Ning, turns 36 on Sunday. Happy birthday, you old fart!
Late to the blogging game and caught in the throes of newbie enthusiasm, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen hasn't yet learned the virtues of thinking before clicking the "Publish" button. Here's the story of the post he quickly came to regret.Andreessen picked up a recent Valleywag item on Microsoft's "people…
In addition to sporting one of the most hilarious illustrations ever to appear in the Wall Street Journal, the "Wizards of Buzz" article trend piece on social media "influencers" really should be the reddest of red-meat linkbait, right? So how's the article doing on the sites it mentions?
Digg - 420 diggs as of…
"We're on the same trajectory that Digg was at the beginning," Netscape head Jason Calacanis said onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit today about his social news site's main competitor. But that's not what one online stat tracker says. According to Alexa, Netscape's traffic has fallen since he revamped the site, despite…
The hacker named "D" didn't really want to write "fuck" in a pop-up when he hacked Netscape.com.
What happened to the nice Mike Arrington? We don't pretend to know, but now that the formerly friendly TechCrunch blogger has transformed into Fighting Mike, here's a round-up of his feuds and feuds-to-come.
In the war of the social bookmark sites, Digg is the good guy and Netscape is the bad guy, right? According to this reader, Digg is a hive of scum and villainy, and if Netscape becomes one too, it's all the fault of outside marketers. Shane Coffey reports on the covert scam scheme threatening to ruin social…
Just a few weeks ago, Netscape head Jason Calacanis offered to pay top users from other social networks like Digg if they defect to Netscape. Jason maintains that he's doing this to reward his best users, not to save a struggling brand by cannibalizing its competitors.
AOL Netscape head Jason Calacanis has started a trend in user-buying. Fashion site StyleHive followed Jason's lead by e-mailing fashion bloggers, asking them to post fashion-related bookmarks on StyleHive for a dollar each.
Early this morning, a few (unpaid) Netscape readers were doin' their thing when two pop-ups...popped up. Tipster and AOL employee Conrad Quilty-Harper notes, "Wisdom of the crowds eh?!"
Right, Netscape head Jason Calacanis will try to spin this one way, and Digg founder Kevin Rose will try to spin it the other. But the real story behind the latest battle of the social bookmarking sites started like this:
