Nonsensor.

Actually, not anymore. But trust me. Shoulda blogged sooner I guess. Yesterday the readers of the design showcase CSS Mania put Emurse at a solid 9. Emurse, if you don't know already, is shooting off like a rocket. Play by play is always best from Alex, although today's most significant appearance was a good run on the front page of digg, where the comments weren't even bad at all.

Myself, I'm pumped for CSS Mania though, just because it's the one place where my part of the project is specifically addressed. Can't say as I did it alone though. We had great usability data, well-written tools on the backend, and a fantastic vision from the get-go. Emurse is a classic case of retaining focus through the course of a project. So many entepreneurs sell their own great ideas short by going crazy and trying a million other things. Alex and Gavin have definitely stayed the course and the product shows it.

I sincerely hope that Emurse becomes a project, like Flickr or Dabble, that makes its way out of the relatively niche Web 2.0 space and onto the desktops of the average user.

Is give the New Netscape a chance. I recently created a user account, went through some stories, commented and voted on some, and got together a friends list of people I know (granted, they're developers and anchors). While it's still got kinks, the whole process was very smooth and I'd be incredibly proud if I were Alex or anyone involved.

But it's really discouraging, the number of beta users who are just there to make pro-Digg (or, more accurately, anti-Netscape) comments. There are numerous reasons why the ridiculously simplistic "Netscape is a Digg ripoff" argument is frustratingly tired already.

1. The target demographic has overlap, but is in large part very different. What's wrong with bringing the ideas behind the very nerdy (face it) Digg to the masses? I'm talking people with "@aol.com" at the end of their addresses. Or your dad. As Jason argued, consider it flattery because Digg innovated. Sure, many innovators in history never get their due, but I think Digg's already gotten theirs. The Sex Pistols didn't innovate much beyond what the Ramones did, but they did have their own take on it. They drove it to greater commercial success, but that hardly stopped people from writing about or listening to the Ramones. (pop music metaphors, it's all I got.)
2. The anchor thing. It's been pushed again and again, but people aren't hearing it. I think the reason for that is that anchors are still serving at their base minimum functionality. Pretty soon you're going to see a lot more stuff happening on the anchor side of things.
   

And to that end, I think the attacks from the extremes of the Digg camp (acting as if they were endorsed by Digg itself, or possibly Jesus) prove why the anchor idea is going to be at least useful, at best revolutionary in the social news space. Very few articulated responses or arguments have hit our doorstep, mostly it's just random cries of "ripoff" riddled infinite variations of spelling and grammar. I'm not saying that's everyone - in fact, there have been some great arguments that lead to decent discourse, but those seem to be the exception. What does that prove to me? It proves that people aren't thinking this out. They're following the hive mind effect. The same one that gets O'Reilley writers' Wikipedia pages loaded with slander. You can see it anywhere on the web with a large user base, from Slashdot's anti-Microsoft bias to a Something Awful thread where members step dangerously close to the wrong side of legality in the name of some kind of perceived retribution.

Again, I'm not saying that the Digg model is bad, but it does open the way for that sort of mob mentality, and right now Netscape - which, ironically, just may have one solution for the effect - is the Frankenstein's monster running from the torches.