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To: jhg_in_kc who wrote (6674)	3/15/1999 10:23:00 AM
From: stock_bull69	Respond to of 41369

Found this article in the New York Times this morning: Netscape Applies Open Source Idea to Custom Page Service By PETER WAYNER Netscape is expected to unveil on Monday a radical restructuring of its personalized My Netscape service that will open it up to content from most corners of the Web. My Netscape, a free service that is supported by advertising, allows users to set up a customized page of news and data. Until now, only content from Netscape or its partners was available. Essentially, Netscape will now invite almost any Web site to be its partner and offer content to users of the service. Users of My Netscape will be able to add "channels" like this one from sites that choose to participate in the service. The move is another advance in the intense competition between Web portals, each trying to be the first site Web surfers turn to for news, Web searches, stock quotes and other information. As it has in other areas of its business, Netscape is trying to gain an advantage by capitalizing on the trend of "openness" sweeping through the computer industry. Last year the company released the source code for its Web browser, allowing anyone to examine and even modify the workings of the software. Jeff Treuhaft, director of product marketing at Netscape, said the company hopes My Netscape will "bloom" if Web site owners big and small choose to participate. He said site owners will want the additional attention that can come from allowing users to put their sites' content on a page they check frequently. "Offering access to our content in the My Netscape format is a no-brainer for us," said Jim Stafford, president of the online division of the business magazine Red Herring. "Some of the other sites make it very expensive to make your content available to their audience." Red Herring will be one of the first sites that My Netscape users will be able to add to their pages on Monday. Stafford also said that the model should attract more users to My Netscape. "You look at all of the 'My' products on all of the different portals," he said. "They dictate to the user what the user wants. What do you get? A Reuters feed, an AP feed, or one of their partners' feeds? I think a lot of people are getting bored because the depth of personalization is not there. It needs a higher level of customization." Dave Whitinger, technical editor of the Web site LinuxToday, says his site is working hard to be one of the first to participate. He said his readers will be interested in the service. "They'll have all of their headlines there without having to go across fifteen different sites," he said. My Netscape users customize their pages by adding different "channels," small boxes that include bits of information from a single content provider. News sites may roll together the top headlines of the day into a channel, while a weather channel might include icons that indicate whether it will rain or shine. In the past, sites like Netscape, Excite and Yahoo that offer customizable pages have either created their own channels or signed licensing deals with other content providers. Netscape is neither charging nor paying sites to participate in the service. Treuhaft said that Netscape has had great success with a similarly open approach to maintaining a Web guide, the Netscape Open Directory. Anyone on the Internet who volunteers can be an "editor" for a particular subject area of the directory. Other directories like Yahoo pay employees to add links and edit entries. Treuhaft said the goal is not to save money but to open the process up to many different voices. At the foundation of the changes to My Netscape is an open standard for sharing or creating channels known as the RDF Site Summary format, or RSS for short. (RDF stands for Resource Description Framework). An RSS file might include a list of headlines, an image and some links, each marked with appropriate formatting. The My Netscape site will periodically retrieve a current RSS file from participating sites in order to keep the content up to date. While any Web site can create its own RSS file and distribute it, Netscape will be a bit circumspect about choosing which RSS files will be included in the list of participating sites offered to My Netscape users. Pornography and other content deemed offensive will be forbidden. Treuhaft said these restrictions are similar to those used by sites that offer space for personal home pages. "We may loosen our restrictions as the program grows, but for now we feel comfortable that we can restrict the amount of abusive or pornographic content," he said. "We may decide to reverse that in the future." Netscape could have kept the offerings of My Netscape limited and charged content providers hefty fees to participate, Treuhaft said, but allowing many sites to target My Netscape's audience should benefit the company more. "By opening the site, we'll grow the size of the pie that the user gets to see and the size of the pie that Netscape gets to see." Netscape said in January that 10 million people had signed up for services on its Netcenter site, which includes My Netscape. Revenue from the site made up 27 percent of the company's total sales in the first 10 months of 1998, according to company reports.