NETSCAPE, a company that once threatened to overhaul Microsoft, has been reinvented as a blogger’s news site in an attempt to revive the flagging brand.

The idea is to aggregate news stories, chosen by both readers and site editors, add comments to them, and allow readers to rank their importance by voting on their quality — creating a social-network news site.

Jason Calacanis, Netscape’s general manager, said yesterday that the new Netscape would not aim to replicate the quality of traditional media but instead add to it. He said that if traditional media took reporting “90 yards, we take it the next 10”.

The plan marks the latest in a series of strategic shifts for Netscape. In the 1990s, Netscape threatened to become the dominant internet brand after the company shot to prominence inventing the most popular browser used to navigate the web.

However, its dominance was gradually eroded by Microsoft, which gave away its own browser and eventually became the market leader, leaving Netscape unable to compete.

AOL bought Netscape in 1999 and later folded it into Time Warner. Netscape was reinvented as a web portal, and later as a cheap internet provider, but neither initiative succeeded.

Traffic at the Netscape homepage is in decline, with only 11.4 million users visiting its home page in May, down 26 per cent on the year.

Time Warner is hoping that it can revive Netscape by aiming somewhere between Google News’s computer-generated ranking system of third-party providers, and attempts to create news websites, such as digg.com, where readers submit their own stories.

The American corporation, also behind the Warner Brothers film studio and the world’s biggest magazine publisher, is also desperate to rebuild the AOL unit, which has acted as a drag on the company since the merger.

Dick Parsons, chief executive, wants gradually to abandon its traditional subscription internet access business — which is increasingly dominated by telecoms groups in the broadband era — in favour of a strategy of generating ad revenues from online content.

As part of that initiative, Time Warner is also trying to offload its AOL access businesses in Europe. The company would like to sell its UK arm, which has 2.3 million customers, for about £600 million, although interest so far has been muted amid concerns about the price sought.

Last year Time Warner sold a 5 per cent stake in AOL for $1 billion (£540 million) to Google, in a deal that made Google the default search engine on the AOL site. In return, Time Warner conceded that Google had the right to force a flotation of AOL, or a buyback of its stake in 2008.

AOL profits fell 14 per cent to $269 million in the first quarter of the year, after a decline in the internet access subscribers.

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