As some of you may already have noticed, we have stopped marking stories as having hit the homepage for the purposes of showing them on a member's stat page, under "Homepage Stories" (shown in Figure 1).

We are reevaluating our homepage configuration, as well as the calculation of member site rankings. Once we have finished our investigation, the idea of "Homepage Stories" may very well become obsolete.

If you have thoughts on the matter, submit them to: feedback@newnetscape.com. Kindly add a subject line of: "Homepage Stories counts" so we can find them quickly. We will not respond to any of the feedback directly, but will use the feedback in our discussions.

We will leave the module up for the time being, but will not add any new stories to these listings until we have made a decision on the future of this statistic.

Figure 1: An Example "Homepage Stories" display, seen here.

Yesterday afternoon, we pushed a newer version of the homepage.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... ;-)

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.

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.