Sample the Web

As you all most likely know by now, Jason is exiting Netscape, stage right.

I just wanted to weigh in to say Netscape isn’t going anywhere other than onwards and upwards. I’m taking over the helm of the site with Jason leaving, we’ve been building up our development team and are going to have some new features and enhancements to the site very soon, as well as a few really interesting things that we think not only our current members, but the entire web community will love. We’re ramping up our content production with more Netscape created videos and event coverage and more metajournalism on more stories submitted to the site. We’re actively recruiting more Navigators. If you think you have the chops to submit great content and help build our community, please email myself and my fellow Netscape Anchor, Ryan Budke (ck at new netscape dot com and ryan at new netscape dot com).

Since early January when Jason first brought me on board full-time with AOL to help him build this new project, the entire team has had one goal in mind: bring the same sense of discovery that the original Netscape brought to us all during the early days of the Internet. Back when Netscape was one of the first browsers and one of the first websites, there was no Google, there was no blog explosion, and the Internet was a largely uncharted place where new and interesting things were popping up daily. Netscape helped us find those interesting things.

Today, the Internet has become a living, breathing online community. The new and interesting things are still being daily born in this space, but due to all the uninteresting things out there—the spam, the advertorial nonsense, and the trolls who think they have the right to flame and act horribly towards their fellow netizens—it’s becoming more and more difficult to discover the greatness out there on the web. Team Netscape wants to help everyone find that good content and we’re dedicated not only to growing and promoting Netscape but to improving the neighborhood of the larger Internet community. If you can think of any way that Netscape can help make the Internet a better place and a more dynamic experience, please don’t hesitate to contact me and let me know.

Dave Winer notes today:

Did the experiment at netscape.com work? My guess is that it didn’t. Why? First, for the obvious reason, people don’t quit so quickly when their latest venture was a success. If it worked (and note that Jason doesn’t say that it did) why quit so soon? Because there’s new management at AOL? With all due respect to Jason, that doesn’t make much sense to me.

I can assure you that the experiment is working. We’re growing daily in readers. We’re growing daily in members. We’re hiring more Navigators. We’re growing in votes and stories submitted. We’re developing more and more key features. I love Jason and am thankful for all that he’s done promoting us and bringing our work to the forefront in many of his discussions online, but Netscape.com is more than Jason Calacanis, just as Weblogs, Inc. and AOL are more than Jason Calacanis, and the entire Netscape team is dedicated to making Netscape the best experience that we can for our growing members and our growing readership. Given that, I have no doubt that we will continue to succeed. [Aside: Dave, if you're interested, we'd love to have Dave's Weekly Picks, or some such feature on Netscape.]

As soon as I get permission to share any of the numbers regarding our traffic, I will share them publicly here. In the meantime, I can assure everyone that the current buzz about Denton’s trumped-up numbers and Jason’s response to those trumped-up numbers has little to do with the fact that Denton’s numbers are extremely off base (based on the Comscore data I’ve seen as well as our own internal data), and we’re doing better than we projected we would be doing when we started planning the new Netscape back in January. We had an expected loss of readers to Netscape, but many of them migrated to other AOL properties. Since that loss, we maintained a more or less steady stream of readers over the dull summer months where everyone was more interested in heading outside into the sun than browsing the web, and since then the numbers have been on an up tick. That’s the first time Netscape has been headed up in numbers in several years.