Netscape Anchor Ryan Budke is at Macworld with the TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) Team for today's Steve Jobs' Keynote at Macworld 2007. Make sure you check out TUAW's Night Before Stevenote Podcast to hear the entire TUAW team's predictions mixed in with a few remarks from Ryan. Also, stay tuned to the TUAW Macworld category for all kinds of detailed coverage from Macworld 2007.

Ryan and TUAW are going to have some videos from the event later this week and some interviews with people like Guy Kawasaki and Leo Laporte, but in the meantime, feel free to join me in our Netscape Chat Room for a discussion of the Keynote, live while it is happening, today at 12 EST.

Also, make sure you check out TUAW's live-blogging of the keynote.

Tomorrow, we're adding a few new, albeit long-requested, features to the site. You can see them both in action in Figure 1 below:


Figure 1: Notice all stories now have a Sink button under the Vote button and a Retract button appears if you have already voted on or sunk a story. Sunken stories (like the two bottom ones in this screenshot) appear grayed out.

You now have the option to not only Vote for stories you like, but add a Sink vote to stories you don't like. This sink vote doesn't affect the actual ranking of the story, but each story will note whether it has mostly positive or mostly negative ratings above the story title, and it will list the number of votes to the number of sinks. If you choose to sink a story, that story will appear grayed out for you (but not for everyone else). However, if a story receives a negative rating over 60%, then the story will appear grayed out for everyone (see Figure 2 below). Also, if you accidently click on Vote when you meant to click on Sink, or vice versa, we now have the long-requested Retract button, which will allow you to retract votes or sinks that were unintentional or if you happen to change your mind about a certain story.


Figure 2: Since over 60% of the votes for this story have been sinks, it shows up grayed out in the On Deck page, even though I have yet to either vote for or sink the story.

For those of you who are worried that your enemies will Sink every story you submit, rest assured that they will at the very least be held accountable for their actions. Just as Netscape keeps track of who voted for every story in the system, we will be keeping track of who sunk a particular story (see Figure 3).


Figure 3: Who sunk this story? These guys did. Quick add them to your Enemies list! (Note to developers: We need an Enemies feature on the site.)

It also bears mention that Sinks will now be tracked as part of your overall activity on the site on your member page. With tomorrow's push, we will have also fixed the Activity page display so stories do not appear multiple times in the list, but rather each time you interact with a story, that story will pop to the top of the list with all the interaction you've had with the story. We hope you all enjoy these new features, as we think they will make the site more dynamic. If you have any ideas for future improvements, keep them coming our way. We're all ears.

Figure 1: Wil's blog: Wil Wheaton dot Net

He's been lurking in the shadows for two months now, but I'm very happy to formally announce that Wil Wheaton has joined the Netscape Navigator team. Here's the post on Netscape, linking to his own in-exile tale of how he joined our team. Wil is well known for his acting, but I think he's better known on the Internet for being an outspoken individual who really loves blogging, technology, and participating in Internet culture in as many ways as possible. In short, he gets what's good about the web. As such, I think he's a perfect fit for our team and I'm happy to welcome him aboard.

You can check out all Wil's great submissions on his profile page. And make sure you check out his contributions on Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, and Fark, and his blogging on TV Squad, Card Squad, and his own "temporary" blog. Also, check out some of his video work over at Revision3.

Figure 1: Our developers worked hard over the past 24 hours in the computer dungeon we've built for them.

You know all those people you see on TV who have gone in for some plastic surgery and come out with just a wee bit too much Botox? Or people who have their smile worked on and it just looks a bit too much like the smile on Jack Nicolson's version of The Joker in Tim Burton's Batman?

Well, yesterday, after our facelift to our member pages, many of you let us know loud and clear that you thought we'd crossed that line from delicate touch up to Frankenstinian abomination.

Today, we pushed an update to those changes that we hope will convince you that we were just suffering from some post-facelift swelling.

We've fixed a lot of bugs, ordered member activity in chronological order on the profile page, and added more options for the Friends' page, including as list of your friends' recent submissions (as in the last generation of the profile pages) and a Recent Friends' Activity page, which is a web-based version of our recently released Firefox extension. We've also added a new stats page and upped the font size of any Notes you want to add to the stories on your Activity pages. Also, there is now a note at the bottom of each story indicating what type of interaction you had with the story.

As always, let us know what you think. We'll keep the developers in the computer dungeon for as long as it takes to improve this site. They like it in there.

You've asked for it, and we're listening.

If all goes as planned, by the end of the week the Technology and Gadgets channels will become one channel (Tech & Gadgets) and in the empty channel slot we'll be adding a Humor Channel. We hope you all have fun with it.

Figure 1: New Netscape Anchors Recommend box and story capsules.
We pushed a slight face-lift to Netscape today. We've made the pictures slightly smaller, and made the page load faster. We've also switched over to the new story capsule format which I had mentioned here before. This new capsule highlights the channel the story comes from, has a direct link to the source of the story and a discussion link to the comments for the post.

We've also updated the Netscape Anchors Recommend tabs so that the related stories are listed cleanly at the bottom of the box.

Another big change for the homepage can be found in the sidebar.

We have made the Tracker bigger, providing more information of what's happening live on the site.

We put the Netscape Top Contributors in a Top 15 list with links to each person's member profile page next to some basic statistics on that member, such as the number of submitted stories, the number of stories that have made it to the Homepage, and the number of comments made by that member.

I know a lot of you loved the member icons showing up here, but they were severely slowing down the page load time, so we decided to go for functionality over form with this new look.

Finally. we've added an "On Shift" function, so that you can see what Anchors and what Navigators are currently working on the site. This way you can message the people on shift directly with any questions you may have or any breaking news that you've found that you think deserves to be pinned.

We hope that everyone likes these new features, and as always, please let us know if you have any suggestions.

We're still a little stuffed from Thanksgiving and feeling a bit sluggish this Monday. In the meantime, here's some more original Netscape Video content from the set of Scrubs:


Remember, you can embed our videos in your own website or blog and present it in clean format by adding "-c" after embed in the src URL.

From Team Netscape to all our members and readers: Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Turkey Day! Happy Tofurkey Day! Happy Holidays! And safe travels to all of you traveling!

If you're one of our many readers and members who live outside of the U.S. and you don't celebrate Thanksgiving, we still want you to know that we're thankful for your readership and your participation on this site. We couldn't do this without all of you!

And to Team Netscape: Thanks for all your hard work! It's an absolute joy to work with such a dedicated team of talented individuals!

Every so often at Netscape, we get a message asking, "What's up with the Do No Evil Channel?"

The concept behind the Do No Evil Channel, originally, was to post really good, even saintly, stories about people or companies out there in the world trying to make a positive difference for us all, juxtaposed with posts about downright evil and wrong actions by others. Do No Evil was supposed to be a place to shame those who were engaged in shameful acts and applaud those who were doing good in the world.

We see some of that in the channel, but recently, several members have been using the channel to post bits of humor and humorous videos.

So we're wondering, should we continue down the road of good and evil with the Do No Evil Channel and open a separate Humor Channel? Should we in some way reinvent Do No Evil as Good vs. Evil or Good and Evil? Or should we end this Channel and replace it with others?

Let us know what you think. What channels do you like and which new ones would you like to see?

Figure 1: A new approach to the story capsule for Netscape can be found on the hometest3 page.

We're constantly working to improve the new Netscape experience for our members. If you head over to the hometest3 page, you'll find a new look for the site that we're seriously considering. As you can see in Figure 1, we've changed the story capsule format as well as the appearance of the Netscape Anchors Recommend... section. The pictures are slightly smaller, so that the page loads more quickly. The title exists on its own line and is linked to the permalink page for the story. The channel is highlighted in all caps at the beginning of the summary, linking to that channel page. The View link lets you view the site in our framed Navigator interface. Discuss shows you the number of comments and links to the comments on the permalink page. The Source link takes you directly to the submitted story and off of Netscape. And then of course, you will see the age of the post followed by the name of the member, which links to the member's profile page.

We also have changed the way the Top Netscape Contributors and the Tracker display in the righthand column of the site.

Let us know what you think about this new look for the story capsule. We'll take your comments into consideration, tweak it a bit more, and barring any blatant deal-breakers, we'll be launching this new story capsule in the near future.

Along with our new Navigators, we added a new revised version of our FAQ to the site yesterday.

There are several changes throughout the document, but the most important is the additional information on what types of stories beyond regular spam we will close and why. Here's that section:

For what other reasons will you close a story?

Netscape is a news site, so newsworthiness is something to consider when submitting stories to Netscape. We reserve the right to close stories that:

1. Are old news.

2. Are non-html files that do not qualify as news (this includes direct links to executable programs, screen-savers, PDFs, Word Documents, Excel Documents, etc).

3. Are in any way deceptive to our readers (this includes spam-heavy websites that place a full slot of advertisements above the fold, forcing our members to scroll down to read the real content on the site, or blogs that disguise links to advertisements in the text of their posts).

4. Are press releases. For example: A story about Apple Computer's newest product by Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal is news. A press release from Apple about the new product is not news. A blog post on Engadget about the press release that discusses it, adding additional information and questioning how good the product will be, is news.

5. Detail ways to hack or otherwise exploit our site. For security reasons, any such stories will be closed. Please message us directly with any vulnerabilities or bugs you think you may have discovered.

If you check out the right-hand column on Netscape or our About page, you'll notice that we have some new Navigators on the team. We've brought on 7 new Navigators for a total of 23 Navigators helping us make Netscape the best social news experience we can. Even better news, we're still hiring! Our plan is to continue adding new Navigators until we have a fully fleshed out team of people skilled in finding good stories and news and promoting the growth of a community as rich and varied as the Netscape community. If you're a top contributor to a social bookmarking or news site, a top blogger, or a top member of Netscape itself and you're interested in joining our team of freelance cool-hunters, then please email ryan at new netscape dot com with your details. He'll get in touch with you, and we'll see where the conversation takes us.

Our new Navigators are:

Jeremytoday, who has been one of the most prolific members on the site, and we're happy to have him on board.
Fedquip, who besides being a regular contributor to Netscape and Reddit, runs Throw Away Your TV.
Aidenag, who has been a top Digg user for quite some time and whose addition to Netscape caused a bit of a stir over at Digg.
MikeF, who we hope will bring his experience from FreeIndie.Com to breathe new life into our Music Channel.
Idyll, who for a long time now has been a top user over at Reddit, where she is currently ranked #4 all time.
GregD, who runs TreeLimb.org and is considered by many to be a top Digg user.
Pagey, who is also known as GeekForLife over at Digg, where he is a top user.

Please join me in welcoming them all aboard!

Yesterday afternoon, we pushed a newer version of the homepage. Instead of 3 stories from each of the top 5 channels and 2 stories from each of the next 5 channels, this new iteration of the homepage displays the top 2 stories of each of the top 10 channels and the top story from each of the next 5 stories, ranked. We think this brings a more balanced experience to the site, while allowing for more growth of the individual channels. You can still find the pure-ranked version of the homepage via the More Hot Stories link at the bottom of the homepage. We still have hometest (what had been the homepage last week) and hometest1 (top story from the top 25 channels) up and running as well. Now, what can we test on hometest2 next... ;-)

Alexia and Ryan have been getting some great content together out in LA over the past several weeks. Check out this new video from the set of Studio 60: