By Rachel Chalmers
Web publishers can now create their own custom channels for Netscape Communications Corp’s My Netscape, a personalized internet start page service. Until Monday March 15 1999, the only content available through My Netscape was from Netscape and its partners. Now the service is open to almost any publisher, and Garden.com, JavaWorld, Red Herring, Lanier Travel Guides, Linux Today, MacCentral and Salon have already jumped on board. The channels will be accessible through Netscape’s Open Directory – the open source web directory once known as NewHoo. Users can search for their web sites of choice and click to add them to My Netscape pages. The company says the My Netscape Network uses publishers the same way the Open Directory uses volunteer editors – that is, as a way of collecting and aggregating knowledge and creativity at minimum cost to Netscape.
The New York Times also pounced on this angle, describing it as open source. Frankly, that’s a bit of a stretch. The My Netscape Network is built on the RDF Site Summary format (RSS), an open format that lets web sites exchange commerce summaries and e-commerce data. While publishers can use RSS to deliver their frequently updated content to users of My Netscape, which is nice for them, it’s just a file interchange format. RSS – and by extension, the new, improved My Netscape – is more like a standardized application programming interface than anything resembling genuinely open source.
