As Peter Cohan and Tobias Buckell have covered, TimeWarner's (TWX) AOL is considering giving away its content to nonsubscribers, but along with that earthshaking, well, shake-up -- it is probably not a bad idea to keep in mind what ConsumerAffairs.com has to say: AOL's Problems Worsening as Consumer Complaints Mount. 

Boing Boing, digg and plenty of others helped circulate the hilarious-except-when-it-happens-to-you debacle of one customer's attempt  to get AOL to cancel his dial-up service last month. That resulted in an apology from the company and the firing of the phone agent involved.

There is no correlation between the release of the tape and today's reports of possible changes in AOL's business model, but as someone who has -- at least I hope I have -- long ago put his phone sales-and-retention employment experience behind him, I know that the pressure to keep accounts active in a highly competitive environment can be intense. That doesn't excuse the employee's methods, or necessarily warrant AOL to accept responsibility for its retention policies rather than scapegoat the one employee that got busted on tape, but it does point out the striking change that might occur in the company culture if AOL does go ahead with this idea. 

Giving away content can be one of the most powerful ways to grow the influence of a business. Sacrificing the revenue of billions from paid accounts might be a huge price to pay for that growth. But then again, so many outfits, large and small, offer similar services faster, better, and cheaper. Maybe AOL should look into relieving itself of a multi-billion dollar headache.

Netscape.com has been reinvented as a web 2.0 media site. A division of Time Warner, the Netscape.com homepage has been through a whole bunch of remodelling, and is now being unveiled as a mix of news reporting, blogs, and a lot of the latest social online networking apps built in.



Early buzz by websites bill it as a 'Digg-clone' (a nod to the popular news website that uses user votes to propel linked news articles or other various links up to the front page), but arbiter and monitor of all things web 2.0 Tech Crunch points out that the new Netscape uses an interesting combination of user votes and an editor who promotes highly voted stories to top of the page.

As Tech Crunch also notes, with some 811 million hits a month, a lot more people visit Netscape.com than Digg. Netscape.com stands a good chance of becoming a major chaneller of online traffic. As getting 'digged' or 'slashdotted' or 'boing boinged' is one of the ultimate badges of high traffic-dom online we might soon have to add 'netscaped' to the vocabulary.

I really am impressed with the idea of melding the social voting side of the web 2.0 world of sites like Digg with human editorial oversight. I think pure voting leads to a tragedy of the commons, where what happens is you get light fluffy interesting things pop up, but the real digging that a dedicated editor can do is lost. Slashdot's strength shows what having editors can net you. Certainly this is by far more interesting than the purely mechanical Google News approach. I do agree with Pro Blogger Darren Rowe that it is annoying to click the links on the stories and not go directly to the stories in question. I'm shepherded within Netscape.com an extra layer, but this is another chance for Netscape.com to serve ads, and for financial viability it's an obvious choice. I think, though, it does bleed out a little bit of trust for some users.

That's all the online applications considered. The biggest break and step forward, and where this new model really lifts the best of all worlds and moves forward, is that there are editors who are paid to comment on the news stories and fact check them, as well as do additional research. Fact checking mass media in public and augmenting their stories with people who are paid to do nothing but keep track of this stuff has the potential to really make an interesting new hybrid. Even though I work for Weblogs Inc. this was my first time seeing it tonight, and I'm quite taken by the whole idea. At first I did dismiss this as an AOL Digg-clone, but I think it has the potential to be a completely different animal.