Propeller was a

social news Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not. Etymology The word "social" derives from ...

aggregator operated by AOL- Netscape. It was similar to

Digg Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launch ...

; users could vote for which stories are to be included on the front page and could comment on them as well. As of October 1, 2010, Propeller ceased to be active. The Chief Architect of the site was

Brian Alvey Brian Alvey (born March 6, 1970 in Falls Church, Virginia) is an American serial entrepreneur, programmer, designer and blogger. He grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in San Francisco where he is the CEO of Clipisode. He is best known for co-foun ...

and the lead developer of the site was Alex Rudloff. It was maintained by Weblogs, Inc. CEO

Jason Calacanis Jason McCabe Calacanis (born November 28, 1970) is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York. His second venture, Weblogs, Inc., a publishing company tha ...

until he left AOL in November 2006. The last director was Tom Drapeau. Netscape's market share had been declining for over a year at the time of the change over. Propeller was hosted on the Netscape.com domain from June 2006 to September 2007 when it was replaced by the AOL Netscape generic portal. The previous version of Propeller was released to mixed reactions. Some users liked that they had more participation ability while others found the pages to be harder to navigate and not as structured. Soon after the release of the new site, a story entitled "Netscape's Blunder" was the top rated story.

Anchors

Propeller had several "anchors", which were led by James Marcus, who work on maintaining the site and featuring stories in the "anchor picks" box on the home page. This creates a slightly different environment from Digg, as Digg's homepage rankings are based solely on user votes, where Propeller's are based on both. The rest of the team includes Alexia Prichard.

Scouts

Propeller also paid a small number of power users called Scouts. This group was run by Ryan Budke and made up of Weblogs, Inc. bloggers, Propeller power users and celebrities, including

Wil Wheaton Richard William Wheaton III (born July 29, 1972) is an American actor. He portrayed Wesley Crusher on the television series '' Star Trek: The Next Generation'', Gordie Lachance in the film '' Stand by Me'', Joey Trotta in '' Toy Soldiers'', ...

. Other scouts included bloggers such as Jeff Hoard, Angry Ken, Karina Longworth, Steve Head, Greg DeMaderios, Henry Wang, Digidave, TweekerChick and Corey Spring. These users were called Navigators until the relaunch of the

Netscape Navigator Netscape Navigator was a web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in ...

browser, at which point the name was changed to avoid confusion.

References

External links

WebsiteTechCrunch Search Engine JournalSearch Engine Watch
{{DEFAULTSORT:Propeller.Com AOL American news websites Social bookmarking News aggregators Defunct websites

Anchors

Scouts

See also

References

External links