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.