Late yesterday afternoon, a TechCrunch blogger insisted that he had just heard Netscape's death rattle. According to Michael Arrington, AOL was on the verge of killing off this very site "and redirecting traffic to the Netscape portal instead. One source says it's a done deal. Another says no final decisions have been made." Arrington also reported that the editorial department was "completely freaked out" and that the site would be going black just about any minute now.

Gloomy news indeed--if any of it were substantiated. As the head of the non-freaked-out editorial department, let me say a few things. AOL did just launch a Netscape-branded portal, designed to accommodate those members who don't wish to participate in a social news site. (Those members also have the option of using a personalized portal over at My.Netscape, not to mention the regular AOL portal itself.) No doubt some members will jump ship. But since the social news version of Netscape launched more than a year ago, most of the people with a yen for an old-fashioned portal have already left. Certainly the 323,589 individuals (as of this moment) who have joined the community didn't do so simply to check the weather and headlines.

Our director, Tom Drapeau, already responded to Arrington's post on TechCrunch itself. So did Marcien Jenckes, identified by TC as an "AOL spokesman" but actually a senior vice president in charge of some of the company's premiere properties, including AIM and Userplane.

"I want to echo Tom's post," noted Jenckes. "Community has been a core element of both AOL and Netscape since their inception and will continue to be. As the text on the site explains, we wanted to give a more traditional portal alternative to the Netscape users who requested it. You can rest assured that social news will continue to be an important part of what we do."

Arrington was quick to assail this comment for its vagueness. But he knows as well as we do that corporations--especially corporations as large as AOL--move in mysterious ways. They are hotbeds of rumor. Can we say with absolute certainty that our corporate parent will or will not pull the plug on us? Of course not. But neither can Arrington ("no final decisions have been made"), and neither can his sources, who he declined to identify.

Here at Netscape, we prefer to dwell on the good news. With millions of unique visitors per month, the site is the focus of a growing, enthusiastic community. We have major design initiatives on the schedule for the next year, and will continue to respond to feedback from our large, energetic, sometimes rambunctious membership. We're still here. Should that change, our community will be the first to know.

As strange as it may seem, the "social edition" of Netscape launched exactly one year ago today. We've come a long way since then, with a rapidly expanding community of more than 268,000 members and millions of other weekly visitors. Of course the site itself has continued to change, thanks to our technical and editorial teams--the Netscape you see in 2008 will doubtless look very different from this year's model. But this did feel like an excellent moment to look back and see how we got here.

Alex Rudloff was part of the initial development team back in March 2006, and he recalls that the "social edition" was "largely the brainchild of Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey. While much of the design and general direction of the site had been laid out prior to my involvement, things really kicked off out at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, California. We discussed Netscape's early role as a means of discovery for Internet users, current Internet trends, and the unfortunate tarnishing of the brand over the years. It was clear that we all shared the same vision."

To carry out this vision of Netscape as an innovative social new portal, the existing site would have to be totally overhauled. This was a tall order. What's more, the team had only three months to pull it off. "It wasn't easy," says Rudloff. "That kind of schedule had its difficulties, especially for a virtual team. Our hard deadline meant that we were launching no matter what, even if that meant reductions in initial functionality and performance. Frustration, stress, and eventual exhaustion affected both anchors and developers alike. When we launched, though, it was one of the greatest feelings in the world."

Rudloff put in two more months on the project, improving code and security before returning to Blogsmith (he was, in Brian Alvey's phrase, only "on loan" to Netscape.) He continues to be proud of his involvement: "The brand has returned to its role as a discovery mechanism for Internet users of all demographics."

Meanwhile, the site took off with a bang. The top story during the first month, "AOL Copies Digg," took Netscape's corporate parent to task for meddling with the old portal. The second most popular story, "Netscape's Blunder," was equally unforgiving. In a way, this was a tribute to the intense loyalty of Netscape's original user base. Within a week or so, however, other subjects and stories percolated to the top. Guantanamo, Matt Lauer, Microsoft--the community made its areas of interest loud and clear.

By the second month, the focus had widened still further. The titles of the most popular stories said it all: "Worst President In History," "Lance Bass: I'm Gay," "Newt Gingrich Connects The Dots: Says World World III Has Begun." Stories assailing George W. Bush have continued to dominate the hit parade here at Netscape. But other public figures have gotten their moments in the sun, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Steve Irwin, Donald Trump, Cindy Sheehan, and that perennial pincushion Ann Coulter. And while the focus on politics is pretty consistent here, our membership can be notably passionate about other issues. Last month, to choose just a single example, there was a stampede of voting and commentary about that $64,000 question, "Should Prostitution Be Legal?" (And what's our most recent story? That would be number 411,694, "A Special Report on 21st Century Cities," submitted by Netscape member Deidre. Thanks!)

While the community has grown by leaps and bounds, our technical and editorial teams have kept up the pace of innovation. Recent feature launches include the return of My.Netscape and the Netscape Navigator 9.0 browser. We've also added NewsQuake, where the editorial staff blogs about news, culture, and politics. This mingling of old-fashioned editorial content with the brave new world of Web 2.0 is, of course, a work-in-progress. How will it pan out? We invite you to stick around and see.

Where will the site be going next? Tom Drapeau, Director of Netscape and wearer of the Fearless Leader medallion, has this to say: "The future for Netscape looks very bright. We will continue to develop great new products. We will continue to listen to member feedback. We will continue to develop our social news site, which we believe will become the best of its kind on the Web."

Will the audience remain receptive to these innovations? "Netscape members are unlike other groups on the Web," says Drapeau. "And I am extremely flattered by the kind sentiment I have received through feedback channels. Not all the feedback is kind, of course. But the real conversations I have had with people of every stripe have been rewarding. Please, keep it coming! And here's to Netscape's second year being bigger than the first!"

The Netscape team is very proud to roll out a new feature: NewsQuake. This is where our staff will blog about current events (in the real world and the virtual one), politics, culture, and some of the zanier stories unearthed by our membership. New posts will appear every single day--often more than once a day--and we encourage visitors to stop by, sample the smorgasbord, and leap into the discussion threads.

Frequent visitors may recall that there already exists something called the Netscape Blog. This area of the site has suffered an identity crisis over the past few months. It was originally launched to update the community about the site itself, as well as delivering bulletins about other Netscape products. In January, however, we began to post articles, interviews, and reviews there--and this promiscuous mingling of very different types of content created some major confusion. The Netscape Blog will now revert to its original function, while the staff will blog its collective heart out over at NewsQuake.

Again: we encourage you to stop by NewsQuake. Sample our first salvo of posts--on France's post-electoral hangover, Hillary's sagging profile in the blogosphere, and the pedagogical use of Brokeback Mountain--and let us know what you think. We're listening!

Although The Band never sold as many records as its rock-and-roll peers, this elusive aggregation of four Canadians and one Arkansas good old boy certainly entered the pantheon before calling it quits in 1976. Who else could have marshaled such a mind-blowing parade of stars for its farewell gig, culminating with a rare appearance by former employer Bob Dylan?


Yet the group's catalog of songs has spawned relatively few memorable covers. Sure, Joan Baez scored a hit with her clueless version of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" in 1971. And just about every performer on the planet has taken a crack at "The Weight," including Waylon Jennings, Cassandra Wilson, Joe Cocker, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, and even the Moog synthesizer posse on Switched-On Rock. Often, though, the songs have been given a wide berth. With their funky vibe, rough-hewn harmonies, and tintype vision of the old, weird America, they probably scared off a good many candidates.

None of that seems to have discouraged the artists on the recent Endless Highway: The Music of The Band (429 Records). The disc mingles traditionalists with Young Turks, the grizzled Allman Brothers with college-circuit favorites like Guster and Death Cab for Cutie. You won't find any hip-hop here--despite Gang Starr's notorious fondness for "Up On Cripple Creek"--nor is there a speed metal version of "Ophelia." Yet the stylistic range is still impressively wide, and a testament to the power of Robbie Robertson's songcraft (which got an occasional, exquisite assist from pianist Richard Manuel).

So who delivers the goods? Generally, it's the performers who honor the spirit of The Band--that odd combo of precision, melancholy, and shambolic glee--instead of mimicking the original recordings. Take my favorite, Guster (below) doing "This Wheel's On Fire." The arrangement, with banjo, piano, and electric guitar jostling in the mix, has that front-porch flavor down pat. There's an organ hovering in the background, and a rollicking take on the chorus (which splits the difference between The Band and early-period Wilco.) It's clear these guys love the song but are leery of excessive reverence: hence the corny, spoken-word coda at the end.


Similarly, Josh Turner puts his own stamp on "When I Paint My Masterpiece." He frames the tune with a crisp string-band setting, heavy on the fiddle and dobro. The Band seldom took such a straightforward approach to country music: when they played "Long Black Veil," they turned it into a dirge. But Turner's deep, playful baritone is anything but generic. And while he irons much of the absurdity out of the lyrics--suddenly they sound like the travails of one more Music Row contender--he whistles a final chorus during the fade-out, as if to remind us that it's all in good fun.

Not everybody fares quite so well. Bruce Hornsby transforms "King Harvest" into competent boogie material. Lee Ann Womack and Roseanne Cash hit all the right notes (on "The Weight" and "Unfaithful Servant") but fail to inject any new life into the tunes. That goes double, unfortunately, for the Allman Brothers. Despite their undoubted Southern cred, they hobble through "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" like Virgil Cane with a bad case of lumbago. The Roches? Don't even ask. My hopes were high for a skeletal spin on "Acadian Driftwood," but these demonically gifted harmony singers spent too much time copying the Cajun-inflected arrangement on Northern Lights, Southern Cross. They should have gathered around some rickety upright piano and done it their own way.

You win some, you lose some. Part of the fascination of Endless Highway is hearing how often the performers fall somewhere in the middle. Widespread Depression dives right into "Chest Fever," nailing the gurgling organ intro and Allen Toussaint's classic horn charts. Yet the vocals aren't quite up to par. Jakob Dylan takes on the dreamiest, saddest song in the entire catalog, "Whispering Pines," and while he coasts through some of the verses, he really pushes himself on the shimmering chorus. Was he ever going to match Richard Manuel's haunted wistfulness? Of course not. But Dylan, like all the other Band-worshippers on this welcome disc, gets extra points for trying.

By now, many Americans are aware that George W. Bush's famous "sixteen words"--that is, his claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger--were based on forged documents. Few know the intricate history of that bogus dossier. But now Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo, whom Michael Isikoff has called "the Woodward and Bernstein of Italian journalism," have chronicled the whole scam in Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror (Melville House). In a conversation with Netscape's James Marcus, Bonini laid out the farcical facts. He began by discussing Rocco Martino, the shady Italian operator who originally put the yellowcake dossier into play.

Carlo Bonini: Rocco Martino was a former police officer. He had worked for the Italian intelligence services back in the 1970s and 1980s, and it was a disaster--he was thrown out due to his unreliability. To give you one example: in 1985, he was caught up in a failed bank robbery. He wore a fake beard and pretended to be a communist militant.

Marcus: This took place while he was still employed by Italian intelligence?

Bonini: That's right. And when he was finally forced out of the Italian intelligence community, he still remained in the field. Basically he was a sort of freelance agent--you can find many of them in the shadowy world of espionage. He traveled back and forth between the Cote d'Azur, Rome, London, Brussels, and Paris.

Marcus: So he was a man of many clients.

Bonini: Exactly. He was selling the information he gathered to the highest bidder, whether it was true or false. Almost everybody in the European intelligence community knew him well. You might ask why such a man had any standing with these people. The fact is that almost every intelligence agency thought that Martino could give them good information about his other clients. In any case, he turned out to be the perfect man in the perfect place for the yellowcake story.

Marcus: How did that unfold? And what was the role of SISMI, which is Italy's equivalent of the CIA?

Bonini: Martino had a handler at SISMI named Antonio Nucera. At some point in 1999 or 2000, Nucera introduced him to Laura Montini, who worked as a SISMI mole at the Nigerien embassy in Rome. And soon the two of them began cooking up some documents.

Marcus: In Collusion, you argue that Martino and Montini manufactured the yellowcake dossier as a fairly innocuous swindle. Then, after the September 11 attacks, the documents took on a new and urgent life of their own.

Bonini: That's what we discovered. September 11 was an extraordinary opportunity for Rocco--but also for SISMI and for Silvio Berlusconi (below), who had just come into power. Berlusconi was desperately seeking a privileged relationship with the White House. At the same time, George W. Bush was trying to prove that Saddam Hussein was a clear and present danger not only to American interests but to the world as a whole. The yellowcake dossier fit the bill perfectly. So SISMI decided to share the contents of those documents with U.S. intelligence--first in September 2001, then on several other occasions. They shared them with the British, too.



Marcus: There was an amazing convergence of interests here, in other words, which nobody could have anticipated.

Bonini: Absolutely.

Marcus: You and Giuseppe D'Avanzo were the first journalists to break this story in any detail. When did you start covering it?

Bonini: We started covering it July 2003. At that point both Seymour Hersh and the Los Angeles Times began reporting that the yellowcake intelligence was apparently based on forged documents. There was some indication that U.S. intelligence had shared some information with Italian intelligence. It was a very interesting lead, and when we finally got hold of the actual documents and got some SISMI sources talking to us on background, the story began to take off. As you can imagine, it didn't unfold immediately.

Marcus: There are layers within layers there.

Bonini: There are. At a certain point SISMI got defensive about this information, and tried to divert attention from the story, or to put all the blame on French intelligence. "It was Rocco who passed the documents to the French," they said, "and it was French intelligence that passed them on to the British and the Americans." But unfortunately for SISMI, that wasn't true.

Marcus: Were you and your partner ever discouraged from following up on the story?

Bonini: We were under enormous pressure at times. The right-wing press started attacking us, saying that we had personal motives--or worse, that we were reporting on behalf of some mysterious U.S. intelligence officers. Four years later, I still can't understand what sort of argument they were trying to make. It probably reflected the fact that SISMI was afraid of being blamed for the whole mess by the CIA. So yes, there were moments when we felt alone. "Either we're nuts," we told ourselves, "or we're right." I mean, it was hard to believe that Rocco Martino's phony documents ended up in the White House. But that's what happened!

Marcus: Nigergate is the first intelligence screw-up you describe in Collusion. The next chapter is about the famous aluminum tubes, which the Bush Administration claimed were parts for Iraqi centrifuges. Yet the Italians always knew otherwise, didn't they?

Bonini: Of course. The Iraqis had definitely bought huge numbers of aluminum tubes. But those tubes were designed for a conventional missile system that Iraq had developed with the Italians back in the 1980s. The system we're talking about is called the Medusa 81, and the rockets required exactly that sort of aluminum tube, with very particular specifications. And SISMI as well aware of this.

Marcus: Did SISMI pass along that information to the Americans?

Bonini: When the U.S. intelligence community first began discussing the tubes, they asked the Italians to weigh in. And the Italians said nothing. Only 14 months after the invasion of Iraq did they tell the Americans what they had always known.

Marcus: You and Giuseppe D'Avanzo write a great deal about the practice of "competitive intelligence" in this book. Could you say a few words about that?

Bonini: Competitive intelligence is a well known disinformation technique. It's a way to disorient your enemy by giving credence to false information. The yellowcake dossier is a perfect example. You basically steer a piece of rogue intelligence through official channels, until it's incorporated into a white paper. At this point, policy makers read the white paper and ask for further intelligence. Then the vicious circle begins: since the original dossier has already been shared with agencies in other countries, it can be "confirmed" by outside sources. It's like an echo chamber.

Marcus: Part of Collusion is about the efforts of the Berlusconi government to became a player in America's War on Terrorism. But there are also some damning chapters on Italy's domestic efforts. Perhaps you could talk a little about the supposed poison gas attacks on the American and British Embassies in Rome.

Bonini: We were told that there was a group of Moroccans planning to poison the water pipes leading into the British and U.S. Embassies in Rome. It's interesting, because these arrests always follows the same pattern. You need the complicity of the press, and the general sense of fear. If the public is scared, and trapped in a fearful vision of reality, it will believe anything.

Marcus: But as you report, the case against the Moroccans fell to pieces in court. Almost all the evidence was bogus, and the suspects were all declared innocent.

Bonini: That's right, and nobody in the press covered the outcome of the trial. There were big headlines when the Moroccans were arrested. After that, the story disappeared.

Marcus: Europe and America have had a bumpy partnership in the War on Terror--sometimes productive, sometimes less so. Yet the two partners seem to have very different attitudes toward extraordinary rendition.


Bonini: Right now, the rendition issue is a clear dividing line between the European and American approaches to the War on Terror. Rendition is unacceptable to a large majority of the public in many European countries. On the other hand, there is no doubt that these operations--like the kidnapping of Abu Omar from the streets of Milan--were carried out with the full knowledge of the European governments. And probably the U.S. administration thought that was good enough.

Marcus: You're suggesting an additional split here, between public opinion and the governments themselves.

Bonini: Right. So I can understand why the White House felt betrayed. But it seems that public opinion in the United States may be shifting as well.

Marcus: When you began this book, did you anticipate that so many of the dramatis personae would be jailed or indicted by the time you were finished? Nicolò Pollari, for example, was fired as head of SISMI in November 2006 and will be tried for kidnapping in June.

Bonini: I would never have imagined that Scooter Libby (to take another example) would face trial and be sentenced. And Nicolò Pollari--he was considered one of the most powerful men in Italy.

Marcus: How are the mighty fallen!

Bonini: Well, it means that we were right. Let me say it again, though: I have nothing personal against any of these people. What we did was to gather information from everybody, then match it all up. Pollari himself spoke to us three times.

Marcus: One final question. In 2006, the American electorate seemed to repudiate President Bush and much of his agenda. Will that change the sort of intelligence practices you describe in this book? Or will it essentially be business as usual?

Bonini: The U.S. intelligence community is only now just recovering from the run-up to the Iraqi invasion. I don't think they will repeat the same mistakes. That doesn't mean we won't see similar stories in the future, but I don't think we'll see anything quite on this level.

[Note: James Marcus translated Collusion into English. However, he has no prior acquaintance with the authors, nor any financial interest in the book.]

What if you built a forum--and nobody came? That may be overstating the case, but we did want to alert all visitors to the Netscape Community Forum, which has been up and running for some time now. It's probably the quickest way to answer your questions about technical issues, glitches, web mail, and impending versions of the Netscape browser. There's also a Wish List discussion thread and a daily poll, should you be in the mood to pull the (virtual) lever.

Of course you can continue to contact our team of Anchors and Navigators with questions and comments. But the Netscape Community Forum (which can be accessed via the Help tab at the top of every page) is a one-stop resource you might want to keep in mind.

Here at Netscape, we're constantly trying to improve the experience for all users, from casual visitors to hardcore community members. At the moment we're reevaluating some of the site mail features. While that's going on, we've decided to disable one feature in particular: the "All Mutual Friends" box in the Send a Message interface. Why? For one thing, we've gotten frequent complaints from members about spam. So we're looking for the best balance between social networking tools and potential headaches for the community. In two weeks we'll figure out whether to bring back the "All Mutual Friends" box, disable it permanently, or perhaps modify it. If you have any opinions on the issue or suggestions to make, feel free to message me. Your ideas are always welcome.