Once Netscape dominated the browser market as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer does today. Netscape also was (and is) an Internet portal and search destination in its own right, but as fewer and fewer used the Netscape browser, the Netscape portal ceased to be the default home page for many.

AOL, the owner of Netscape is not giving up, though.

The Netscape browser is still around. In its latest incarnation it unites features from Firefox and Explorer.

And the Netscape portal is to be given a new mission, according to the Los Angeles Times, as an experiment in community journalism:

Netscape will rely on its users to submit, rank and comment on news stories, videos and blog postings from across the Web. Stories will be organized into 30 categories, such as movies, travel and money.

So you may yourself submit a story and Netscape will publish it — although “professional editors” may add some more material.

Whether they also will censor unsuitable material is unclear. Nor it is clear — if this is the case — what will be considered unsuitable.

Racist slander, conspiracy theories and other kinds of crack-pot writing may become a serious problem for Netscape, as may link generating search engine spam.

According to PC WorldNetscape.com has hired a mix of journalists and citizen journalists — Netscape Anchors — to comment on the day’s top stories and fact-check them to make sure they are genuine.

To what extent you will be actually able to write a story or just make a summary of existing ones, is unclear. The Baltimore Sun argues that “Visitors will be able to submit links to articles they find elsewhere and vote on the ones they like most.”

Apparently these summaries will link to pages on other sites and open these pages within frames, keeping the visitors on the Netscape site.

Why is AOL/Netscape doing this? The answer is as often these days: Content is king.

Good content, being that articles or blog entries, leads to visitors and search engine listings.

If you can get your visitors to write that content for you, you should be able to generate even more content (and for less money).

The online volunteer based encyclopedia, the Wikipedia, has become a huge success.

The big portals are putting up discussion forums, photo and video sharing services, as well as community sites like Myspace, blog services, and social-bookmarking sites like Digg, all generating pages that give room for — you guessed it — text ads. And text ads bring in money.

May Netscape succeed? It all depends on their ability to edit the content. With weak editorial control the site will get flooded with spam and nonsense. If they are able control this, they may bring the Web something new and valuable.

The new site will launch on July 1st with a beta version available today.

See also: