Tom announced last night the rebranding of Netscape (the social news site) on the Netscape blog, and of course, Valleywag TechCrunch got it all wrong (and even stopped by to gloat).

I'm telling you, if TechCrunch was an entertainment blog, they would have reported Prince's name change as a murder.

AOL News has undergone a redesign to be more "bloggy" (according to Reuters). Part of this update is that now they're featuring the top stories at Netscape.com under the "User Submitted News" in the left-hand sidebar.

I wouldn't mind that section being a little higher up on the page though, maybe replacing any of the nine (yes, nine) links to stories about Paris Hilton being released from prison...

So tomorrow is my last day in Orlando. I don't know if it was something I ate (Cheeburger Cheeburger, I'm looking at you) or just the stress of traveling, but I've felt sick to my stomach since yesterday afternoon, which is terrible timing. If I was going to get sick during this trip, I would have preferred it to happen anytime during the week, since I can still program just fine if I'm nauseous, but it's awfully hard to enjoy the extra downtime of the weekend without being further than 20 feet from a bathroom (just in case).

The work portion of this week's ScapeCon was productive. We planned out some new features that are going to rock your world once they're released. I'm not kidding - the next to you feel the ground shake, or even if you stumble a little bit, that's just us at Netscape, releasing new features and rocking your world.

I should probably get to sleep; I have to be up before 6 tomorrow to make it to the airport in time to catch my flight. (Hopefully the plane won't be as packed as my two flights were on the way here.) Once home, Christina and I are road-tripping it to Yellowstone, so I'll be offline for the majority of the next week.

Love him or hate him, controversial blog-boss Jason Calacanis knows his linkbait. Brooklyn-born Calacanis, formerly the editor of the Silicon Alley Reporter, made a "how-to linkbait me" post on his popular blog, which he writes with his trusty bulldog Toro by his side. (Jason is more recently known for being the impetus behind the relaunch of Netscape.com, which according to some traffic metrics, is now the most popular social bookmarking site on the Web. Kudos to you, Calacanis!)

Of course, I can't mention Jason's blog without linking to this great post from early 2005 where he outlines a typical conversation with a VC regarding the Weblogs, Inc. business. Classic Calacanis! This recent posts detailing what's wrong with PayPerPost is a great read too - his observations are spot-on. Deception never works as a business model. (Or as Jason says, "The fact is no one in the world--NO ONE--wants to be covertly marketed to.")

I remember back in the Silicon Alley days (or the SA days, as we liked to call it), when J-Dawg, Keepsie, and I would hang out late into the night, eating sushi and talking about the last marathon each of us had run. Oh, how we laughed! You might not be able to tell from his blog posts, but Jason is a great guy to just chill out with once you get to know him. Watch out though, because while you're just chilling out, Jason has a way of getting you revved up for the next big thing he's working on. Before you know it, it's 6AM and you've been up all night working on prototypes and proofs-of-concept.

So anyway, back to the linkbait thing. In writing a piece explaining to others how best to linkbait him, hasn't Jason in reality written the most effective linkbait of them all? Think about it - now that people know how to get Jason to link to them, the first thing they'll do is follow the instructions, which include linking to Jason many times over (like maybe to his Twitter page or one of the many Digg articles about him). Now that's smart linkbaiting. The only question is, will anyone fall for it?

The whole thing is pretty funny, but I laughed out loud at around 18 seconds left:

It's me! Well, at least if you're signed into Digg, it is. As reported at TheGoogleCache, all you have to do to be added as someone's friend on Digg is to get them to visit

http://digg.com/invitefrom/yourname

while they are logged into Digg. Visiting this URL adds you as their friend without requiring any confirmation, and because of this, I've just added myself as your newest Digg friend by including an iframe on this page that loads that URL. Thanks, friend!

Netscape has a similar feature, but we require you to actually confirm that you want to add that user as a friend. I predict that Digg will be following suit very soon.

Update: It appears that this bug has been fixed. Way to go, Digg.

Netscape's OpenID support is live. This release also greatly simplifies the signup process by removing the captcha and the request for other information that was previously required for registration.

The announcement just went public that, starting on Monday, Netscape.com and My.Netscape will support signup/signin via OpenID, and consequently, AOL screennames (AOL hosts an OpenID for each registered screenname). I've used the OpenID registration/signin process in our QA environment, and it is slick. Kudos to Blaine and Trey on this awesome new feature.

P.S. I know I'm biased, but I love it when a service delivers new features rather than just promising to get around to them.

At the moment, the top nine links at Reddit (plus 2 more in the next 15) are to various articles on the futile grassroots efforts to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Never mind that none of these impeachment proceedings are being carried out by any government bodies with legitimate power and that none will result in any sort of Congressional action - a site with 45% of its front page links dedicated to one political story does not amount to displaying "what's new online;" it's displaying "what's new in our community's agenda." On any other large social news site (like Netscape or Digg), 8 of the 9 links would be flagged as duplicates and removed so that the front page (the site's most valuable asset) actually has value to the readers who don't care about meaningless grassroots impeachment resolutions.

I suppose this kind of gaming is the Reddit's community prerogative, but I'll be avoiding Reddit for at least a few weeks until this little impeachment-fest dies down and they're linking to interesting content again.

My latest teaser for Netscape 9 is up at the Netscape blog:

"Netscape 9 will include built-in tools to share, vote for, and discuss interesting things you find on the Web directly from the browser's URL bar. [...] We feel that having these tools in the browser by default will introduce the idea of social news to a whole new set of users, and it should make it easier for those who are already familiar with the concept."

Something I'll add here is that while this announcement reveals the main pieces of this feature (in-browser voting), it does not reveal all of the features of this piece.

There's an additional forum for discussion at Netscape.com.