Cutting through all the buzz about the New Netscape (which we'll continue to talk about, I'm sure), there has also been a lot of news today about social networking and social search. And for some reason the buzz is all centered on your Yahoo!s, your Facebooks, your MySpaces. No one is really including Time Warner in that category.

And yet ... everything Time Warner is really honing in on now, in the company's internet divisions, is about taking advantage of the social nature of its audience (and really: what is AOL but a bunch of people who love to chat with one another via email, IM, and chatrooms?). Netscape's hugely viral strategy is just one more in a long line of highly democratic media, from AIMPages to this very blog before you.

Investors wonder, wonder, wonder. Today the stock ticked up a teensy bit on the news of the New Netscape, 14 cents to $17.11. I know a lot of you will say "no" but ... is this a buying opportunity? Are investors failing to key in to the opportunities Time Warner is seizing? Or is it just that the conglomerate is to big and unwieldy to be managed by the monstrous and multiple personalities at the helm? I keep asking myself, is Time Warner too cheap to pass up?

Yahoo! and Netscape, oh my! Both are diving head first into the concept of "social search," integrating the mysterious ranking systems of the search engine with the cool democratic nature of the social bookmarking site. As Time Warner was preparing to launch its beta version of the new Netscape, Yahoo! was talking about integrating del.icio.us and flickr, two very very grassroots-y and user-driven properties, with the unknowable algorithms behind its search engine.

Jeff Weiner of Yahoo! says his social search will "tap the untapped authority of users" while Jonathan Miller of Netscape says "We want to marry the great editorial skill of humans and what systems and software can do to create something that is different and better."

These ideas are good and pretty but I have to wonder: how is this any different from how Google has given more weight to blogs in its search engines? How is this different from giving weight to incoming links (which are the most democratic of all democracies)? Yahoo! thinks I am the untapped authority, but really, I'm quite respectably tapped with some 8000 visitors a day to my personal blog: all through the power of my content. And I'm just the tip of the iceberg, other bloggers who fit the category are cashing checks from Google every month.

It's all lovely, and fun, and a good idea. But social search is just a new way of creating a network effect, and the end result will be no different whether you're getting popular through votes or links from your ever-expanding group of friends.