The New Netscape

posted by hal…….

As reported by Reuters, The New York Times and others, Netscape came back to life this morning as an uber-news and blog aggregator. Jason Calacanis, famous for Silicon Alley Reporter and Engadget, is the driving force behind the push to re-invigorate Netscape in it’s new guise as an AOL service.

Nothing wrong with the concept – a lot of others are doing it, so why not jump on the band wagon? You weren’t expecting anything original were you?

I checked it out. Tried to sign up, maybe loft a comment. Sign-up didn’t work on Safari. Didn’t work on Firefox. I went to the trouble of downloading the Netscape browser (7.2 for Mac) – the site still choked on sign-up.

Honestly – today, tomorrow, the middle of next week – it doesn’t matter when you launch a new service AS LONG AS IT WORKS. This would seem to be especially true for a damaged brand like Netscape.

Will I go back to the site? Maybe. Maybe not.

The New Netscape – probably as irrelevant as the old Netscape.

Martha Fires the Donald

posted by hal…
In today’s Media Daily News, Randy Siegel takes us on an imaginary journey through the next ten years of media and technology – Exxon meges with Yahoo, Google buys South Carolina and ABC’s “Desperate Grandmas” debuts to top ratings.

Of course, none of this would be funny if it didn’t have a whiff of truth. It points to the triumph of managers over people who actually make things and highlights our slow cultural drift toward blandness and comformity. Here’s the link – Headlines from The Next 10 Years of Media & Technology