Netscape Reborn as Community News Service

Netscape used to be the first name in Web browsers, then AOL tried to make it a portal. Now Netscape is back as a community-driven news service.

You probably know the story: Netscape wasn’t the first Web browser on the Internet, but it was the one which made the World Wide Web take off, for a few years making the entire technology industry <blink>, striking fear into the hearts of Microsoft and other computing giants, and making lofty claims about the Netscape platform as an all-encompassing net-based operating system. A few years, an aquisition, and a massive antitrust trial later, Netscape was a shadow of its former self, relegated to a vague “portal” and “brand” status within the AOL/Time Warner media empire while browser development largely fled to the Mozilla foundation and, eventually, to Firefox.

Well, now Netscape is thinking about coming back again.

Today Netscape launched a public test of a new effort to re-invent news services. Under the leadership of John Calacanis, founder of recent AOL acquisition Weblogs, the new Netscape.com categorizes news into several broad categories