With the launch of Netscape Beta‘s “Digg killer” that adds human editors (maybe I was onto something with ContentDJ after all), social or meta-journalism is really  heating up. Reactions to the launch have been mixed and a little controversial, but AOL, who owns both Weblogs Inc (who I write for) and Netscape only has the product in beta, so improvements are likely to come. If there is anything Jason Calacanis (CEO of Weblogs and heading up the Netscape project) is good at, it’s soliciting and implementing user feedback.

One of the pros to the new site is that it combines moderators with the social aspect of Digg. Netscape also covers a wider variety of topics while Digg only focuses on tech related news. That will all change though when Digg 3.0 is released next week with more categories and some new features. Digg, while superior for now, has a lot less traffic than the entire Netscape community. It has been said that if Netscape takes off, and small sites make it to the homepage, the amount of traffic could easily crash servers left and right. Getting “Nescaped” would add a whole new meaning to getting “Slashdotted.”

Here’s hoping Smooth Harold is one of the first victims.

(end geek talk)