Calacanis Diggs Meta Journalism Meets Digital Maoism for Netscape

Powder Room
Originally uploaded by modelux.

The non Bill Gates retiring for charity story today is AOL's entrepreneur Mr Calacanis, who has bootstrapped with AOL resources a Digg competitor. I think it will work; Broader categories of content for newer AOL users. I like the meta-journalism idea (from the perspective of a player with resources) : Just not 100% sold on the branding so far (the black and aqua, and fonts are a bit techy for me, and not as clean as digg esp in light of its new leaked screenshots/UI)

Calacanis : "I'm convinced meta-journalism is the piece missing from the Wisdom of Crowds. Doug Rushkoff explained the concept of "meta" to me years ago when we used to go to the Knicks games (those were the days), and reading Jaron Lanier's Digital Maoism piece in Edge last week was perfectly timed for me."

Jason Calacanis (GM of Netscape): "We did not create the New Netscape to copy DIGG, no more than DIGG copied Delicious or Delicious copied Furl. All of these sites are evolutions of the first wave of bookmarking services. The key thing we are doing different is that we are having our editorial team followup on stories that make it to the top 20 list. We're not doing this to become gatekeepers, but rather to add a journalist process to the power of social bookmarking. You can call this metajournalism or social journalism, and I think it's the logical next step.