A Modest Netscape Proposal Continues

Jason Calacanis has continued to work at justifying his offer to bring in the top bookmarkers from competing sites like Digg by paying them to do their news posting at the updated Netscape instead. Calacanis has received a measure of criticism and grief over his offer to pay Netscape. "To me, the best bookmarkers are what we call editors or cool hunters in the business--trend spotters. They see patterns before they emerge, they find the cool stuff before other people do. They have ever right to get paid for it," he identified what has shifted to make the Netscape proposal an inevitable one: We weren't yet able to assign a value - in monetary terms - to what these workers were doing; we weren't even able to draw distinctions between what they were contributing. We couldn't see the talent for the crowd. Now, though, the amateurs are being sorted according to their individual skills, calculations as to the monetary value of those skills are starting to be made, and a market appears to be taking shape. As buyers and sellers come into this market, we'll see whether large-scale social media can in fact survive outside the price system, or whether it's fated to be subsumed into professional media. Today, Calacanis has a $1,000 per month offer on the table. From there, future offers and the number of sites making those offers should only go up. Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Bookmark Murdok: David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.