Today is election day in the U.S., and you can submit stories having to do with the election and read them in our Politics Channel and in our Election 2006 tag. Make sure, if you're an American, that you get out to the polls and vote for your candidates. Even if you're not an American, make sure you vote on the stories that interest you here on Netscape.

We love how successful our Politics Channel has become and we love the members who make up the community breathing life into our Politics Channel.

That being said, we want the Politics Channel to thrive in the Politics Channel, and we want the homepage to be a more balanced experience that all of our members--even those who have no interest in politics--can enjoy. With that goal in mind, sometime today, we will push out a change to the site that was hinted at in my previous post about the homepage experience. The page that was located at http://www.netscape.com/hometest/ will replace the current pure-ranked homepage experience. This version of the homepage displays 3 stories from each of the top 5 channels and 2 stories from each of the next 5 top channels. We think it will add more balance to the site experience and, hopefully, convince thriving communities like the Politics group to spend more time in the Politics Channel and leave the room for some of our other channels to grow. The current, pure ranked version of the homepage will still be viewable by clicking on the More Hot Stories link, which will take you to this page.

Additionally, we are planning on adding another variant of the hometest pages. This version will list the top 2 stories from the top 10 channels and the top story from the next 5 channels. We think this variant will offer the right balance between our current hometest and hometest1 options and should it be received well, we will most likely change the homepage over to that version later on this week.

As always, let us know what you think in the comments.

Since we re-launched Netscape, one of our constant struggles has been to make the homepage one of the best experiences it can be for a social news website. Initially, the homepage was dominated by stories from the Technology and Gadget channels, as early adopters of the site were either technophiles and/or people who were used to Digg and who came over to either kick the tires or try to in some way sabotage or break what they (incorrectly, I think) saw as a site trying to become another Digg. We began trying to grow other channels like News and Politics, and we succeeded in getting members involved in those Channels, but, as a result, the site has become overly focused on Politics and partisan disagreements propel most hot point political stories to the top of the pile and crowd out a lot of other interesting stories from other topic areas.

Our goal has always been to provide a new experience. To build a social news site on top of a portal experience with an editorial layer providing original content and follow up metajournalism in the form of Anchor Commentary. We want Netscape to become the best marriage between what new media, citizens media, traditional journalism, television news, and blogging has to offer. We want it to be an evolution of news and an evolution of the portal. Evolution takes time.

With that in mind, we've come up with a few alternate views of the Netscape Homepage that we'd like you to consider:

• http://www.netscape.com/hometest/ This first variant of the homepage checks to see what are the top 10 Channels at any given time, and then it pulls the top 3 stories from each of the top 5 channels and the top 2 stories from each of the next 5 channels and ranks these stories on the Homepage. As a result, no single channel will ever have more than 3 stories on the homepage, but only the top 10 channels will ever appear in the rankings.
• http://www.netscape.com/hometest1/ This second variant of the homepage checks to see what are the top 25 Channels at any given time, and then it displays the top story from each of those channels and ranks them.

We think both these variant homepages give more balance to the site as a whole, provide a wider variety of information, help people who have less interest in Politics a chance to have their stories rise to the top, and encourage everyone to check out the individual channels, rather than always living on the homepage. What do you think? Would you prefer one of these views over the current homepage? Do you have an idea for another way we could display the homepage?

We'll take whatever you say into consideration and if we change to one of these views, we'll announce it beforehand and keep the previous view around as an alternate.

At Netscape, we're constantly rolling out new features, tweaks, and bug fixes. Sometimes this means daily updates to the site and sometimes it means we're updating the site even more often. One of the things that tends to happen after a major update is that the memory your web browser keeps of how your browser thinks the site is supposed to work doesn't match up with the actual new and improved way that the site works. This can cause what is technically known as "general wonkiness."

Having personally worked in technical support for many years in the past, I'm always ready to hand out a bit of maintenance advice to our members who are having trouble. However, as I've been handing out this bit of information much more often than I'd like, I thought I'd share the information as a tip here.

If Netscape starts misbehaving for you, try these steps:

1. Empty your cache (depending upon your browser, you will find the ability to empty your cache file under your Preferences, your Internet Options, or your Settings).

2. Delete your cookies. You don't have to delete all of them. You can just find the Netscape-related cookies and delete them.

3. Relaunch your browser.

4. Log back in to Netscape and see if everything is better.

If these tips don't help, please feel free to message me or any other member of the Netscape team with your problems. Also know that the developers are aware of the current heavy footprint of our cookies and are working towards a solution that will make this little bit of every-so-often maintenance unnecessary.

UPDATE: Chat is now live on the site!

In addition to our Netscape threaded comment system, via which you can communicate with other members about stories, and our messaging system, via which you can send messages to your friends on Netscape, we're adding a new feature very soon: Netscape Chat.


Figure 1: The link to Netscape Chat will appear directly beneath the Today's Hot Stories headline, across from the link to our On Deck page.


Thanks to our developers and some help from our friends over at Userplane, we'll have a static chat room on the homepage of Netscape. If you're a logged in member of Netscape, you can launch the chat and join a live discussion of the top story on Netscape. If everyone is bored with that top story, there will be a list of the top 5 stories with links to all of them. Best of all, it all updates live, so as the ranking on the site changes, everyone in the chatroom will know as the top story listing changes, and the discussion can move on from topic to topic. The chatroom will fall under the normal guidelines set forth for participating in the Netscape Community as outlined in our Terms of Use, and Anchors will check in from time to time to make sure no one is abusing the system as well as to participate in the conversation. As with your comments on the site, please keep the conversation civil or you risk having your chat privileges revoked or a possible ban from the site.

We hope Netscape Chat will provide another way for our community to grow and discuss the news on Netscape, and we hope you all like it. As always, if you have any ideas about how we could make it better, let us know. We're all ears.

You may have noticed that the Sex Channel no longer appears in the list of channels in the right hand column on Netscape and that Sex is no longer an option when submitting stories to Netscape. When we first relaunched Netscape back in July, our hopes were that the Sex Channel would be a place where we could discuss issues pertaining to sex and sexuality in the 21st century's ever-shrinking world.

We were naive.

Unfortunately, the Sex Channel became a never-ending nexus of spam and porn. So we've killed the channel entirely, and very soon all the old stories that were submitted to the Sex Channel will disappear and any links out on Google or elsewhere that point you to them will direct you to a page explaining this tale of dreams shattered and innocence lost. Then you'll have a link to the homepage of Netscape where you can find lots of less spammy and less porn-plagued content.

*'Scape-o-lantern picture courtesy of Chris Finke (more info here).

On behalf of the entire Netscape team, I'd like to wish all of our readers and members a happy and safe Halloween! Don't eat too much candy!

We receive a lot of stories day to day on Netscape. They run the gamut: hard-hitting stories from well-known news sources like CNN and Fox News, stories from well-known and established blogs like The Huffington Post and Engadget, some very hands-on and personal blogging of breaking news, some interesting videos here and there, some conspiracy theories, and quite a bit of spam that we work to kill and remove from the system as soon as we spot it.

Amidst all these various stories, there are quite a few that pop up that are suspicious or questionable. These stories often come out of the blue from some unknown source and with little corroborating evidence to support the story.

Case in point, today we experienced a new twist on the unverifiable story. A Netscape member contacted our Navigator Ousama, along with several of the rest of our Navigators and myself, claiming that s/he has been sent to Iraq as a contractor, asking us to blog about his/her story, keeping his/her identity a secret, and noting that since s/he has arrived s/he has already been shot and has shot someone.

After the jump, you will find his/her story retold via Ousama. We have several reasons for doubting the story:

• After I began looking into this on behalf of the Navigators, I noticed that the member's IP address since deployment has remained the same as s/he used before leaving the U.S. The IP address is not an overseas address.
• The member shares an IP address with another Netscape member. Either they're the same person or they live in the same home or access the internet through the same service or router.
• If you were just shot in the chest, would you be contacting Navigators and Anchors on Netscape?
• An issue that was also raised was how a contractor could operate in Iraq and what type of role they could play, since the member states that s/he is a contractor not a soldier. This raised some flags since s/he states s/he has killed an Iraqi Insurgent. However, here is an older article talking about contractors' roles in providing security in Iraq http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june04/contractors_4-6.html. From that article, it's obvious that contractors do assist in running missions and providing security to the military and private contractors in Iraq [Major thanks to Ousama for digging this information up for us].
  

Read over the story and let us know what you think in the comments. Is this a true life story from a war zone or a hoax?

Netscape is looking for an Editor in Chief.

Qualified applicants will exhibit the following:

• Extensive past experience working at a high-frequency publisher such as a daily newspaper, website, or news wire.
• Comfort with hitting hourly deadlines.
• Knowledge in a range of topics including news, politics, science, sports, and entertainment.
• Innovative thinking on how to best wed traditional journalism skills with social news.
• Leadership skills necessary to motivate, support, and lead our team of Anchors in keeping Netscape updated with fresh new Anchor Commentary throughout the day.

This is a full time salaried position with benefits. Interested parties should send an email to ck at new netscape dot com complete with cover letter, resume, and writing samples.

Yesterday, we silently launched a new feature of the site: the On Deck page (see where we hid the link to it in Figure 1). This page (and all the numbered pages after the On Deck page) updates every 5 minutes with the highest ranked stories that haven't yet made it to the homepage, so you can see what stories are about to make it, try to spot where stories you've submitted are in the rankings, and vote up stories you'd like to see make the homepage.


Figure 1: The link to the On Deck page is located immediately beneath the date and time at the beginning of Today's Hot Stories list on the homepage.

We'll be tweaking the On Deck list over the next several days to try to make it more accurately display what's almost on the homepage.

Let us know what you think.

Besides the inevitable spam and ad-heavy spammish blogs that hide their content under 500 pixels of advertisements, besides the duplicate stories that are rehashed versions of the same story or even the same exact AP story syndicated across numerous local publications that are submitted and resubmitted to Netscape, and besides all the blogs out there breaking the middle-man rule, submitting stories that they've nearly quoted entirely from another source as their own--besides all these things that try to drown and weigh down Netscape, my least favorite type of submission is scraped content.

We just banned http://resanium.com from Netscape because one of our content-partners, Autoblog, found that an entire post from Autoblog had been scraped, reposted to this site, and the reposted link had been submitted to Netscape.

I just wanted to drop a line here and let everyone know that we do not want content stolen from elsewhere posted to Netscape as if it were your own. Your site will be banned for such behavior. In fact, I'm tempted to start publicly blogging a shame list, detailing all the people who we do ban for this reason. The Internet community as a whole needs to start taking a stand against these types of bottom-feeding sites that are cluttering up our search results, our social news systems, and our Internet. Please let us know if there is anything you think we could be doing to better combat this problem.

If you check out our video page, you'll find an eclectic mix of videos uploaded by our members, videos we produced with our content partners like Autoblog and Cinematical, our own video projects like Netscape At The Movies and various bits of Netscape Video from different events, and you'll even find a few content producers, video podcasters, and vloggers who have started to mirror their content on Netscape.

This is great! Netscape is a content hungry platform, so we want to encourage all the video podcasters and all the vloggers out there to submit your videos to Netscape Video. We're a free service, you can upload up to 150MBs per upload with no time limit, you can upload as many files as you like, and once uploaded your video will be available as an embedded flash video for your blog / website, in an iPod-compatible MPEG4 file, and in the original file format. Plus, each episode will be submitted into Netscape where other Netscape members can vote for and comment on each episode. If you submit your stories with a unique tag, you can even subscribe or tell your regular viewers to subscribe to that tag's rss feed to receive all the episodes uploaded to that tag as an enclosure in the feed. For example, if you tagged all your vlogs / video podcasts with "my amazingly wonderful podcast," you could find all the episodes at this URL:

http://www.netscape.com/tag/my+amazingly+wonderful+podcast/

...and you could subscribe to the RSS feed by adding /rss/ to the end of this URL:

http://www.netscape.com/tag/my+amazingly+wonderful+podcast/rss/

See my previous post about how to subscribe to Netscape At The Movies via iTunes to better understand using a unique tag to host your vlog / video podcast at Netscape.

No matter how big or small, we want your vlogs and podcasts. Start submitting them.

If you're a vlogging / video podcasting celebrity like Rocketboom, Ze Frank, Ask a Ninja, Diggnation, or Four Eyed Monsters, please feel free to mirror your content on Netscape for free or to contact me directly if you have any ideas about how we could work together: ck at new netscape dot com.

Check out Karina's round-up video:

Voting and commenting on stories is easy enough and a lot of our members participate in the Netscape community at this level. However, a large percentage of our members don't ever bother to submit a story. In case the process is unclear, I thought I'd write this post explaining three different ways you can submit stories to Netscape, walking you through the process, step by step.

Method 1: Submit a Story / Upload a Video

Figure 1: My member information box followed by our universal navigation links.

When you are logged in to Netscape, your member information box (Figure 1) will be displayed at the top of the right-hand column, followed by some universal navigation links. This list provides several navigational tools (a link to your profile page, your friends, your messages, and a place to find new stories in the Tracker), but for our purposes in this tutorial, the two top options, Submit a Story and Upload a Video, are the most important.

To submit a story to Netscape click on one of these links. Since this is mostly about submitting regular stories, click on Submit a Story.

More after the jump...

One of the most powerful tools of Netscape is our tags feature.

Tags are descriptive words you can add to your stories to make them easier to find. For example, a story about a new iPod might have the followings tags: Apple, iPod, mp3, Steve Jobs. All stories for a specific tag can be found via a very basic URL structure, which you can type into your browser's address bar:

http://www.netscape.com/tag/[tag name]

In this example, you would replace [tag name] with whatever specific tag you are looking for; for tags composed of multiple words, you would put a + between the words. For example, the URL for the President Bush tag would be:

http://www.netscape.com/tag/president+bush

When you submit a story to Netscape, make sure that you enter up to 5 descriptive tags separated by commas to each of your stories. Tags that contain multiple words, such as digital audio player do not need to be included within quotation marks. However, for tags that include punctuation, such as XYZ Widgets, Inc., please wrap these in quotations, e.g. "XYZ Widgets, Inc."


Figure 1: When you submit a story or video to Netscape, the tag field appears immediately beneath the Channel drop-down menu.

Adding tags makes your stories easier to find for other members, but tags can also be a great tool for finding the content you are looking for on Netscape or even organizing the stories you submit.

Keep reading after the break for more tips and tricks related to tags...

Karina has been doing a great job with her weekly movie review: Netscape at the Movies. Here's the latest installment:



Now that we've fully launched Netscape Video, you can subscribe to the feed for the Netscape At The Movies tag, using your favorite podcasting program, to automatically download each new video podcast from Karina in an iPod video compatible format. Soon, I'm going to write up a full how-to explaining how someone with their own website could use Netscape as the hosting service for their podcast and integrate it nicely with their site. In the meantime, however, I thought I'd write a basic how-to (for those of you new to the world of podcasting) explaining how to subscribe to Netscape At The Movies using iTunes.

Read the full how-to with pictures after the jump.