AOL's Digg clone, formerly branded as Netscape and already pronounced dead, will be rebranded as Propeller. The announcement came from Tom Drapeau, the head of AOL's Netscape division since Jason Calacanis's brief tenure. Muhammed Saleem, a Propeller editor né Netscape Scout, thinks technology sites should be eating their hats for the grave predictions. Maybe the site would have had a chance at life and competed with Digg, the social news site, if it had launched with original branding instead of misusing the name of the already-dead Netscape. But AOL angered and turned off a loyal community when, under Calacanis, it killed the original Netscape and, after Calacanis's jealous pursuit of Kevin Rose, its own Digg clone — even if the sites ignominiously remain on life support and AOL refuses to accept that its time to pull the plug.

Tom Drapeau, the current head of Netscape at AOL, is finally admitting that Jason Calacanis's jealous attempt to clone Kevin Rose's Digg was a failure. Sort of. Calacanis, who left AOL earlier this year to launch Mahalo, an also-ran Web directory, had hoped to persuade Netscape's loyal but dwindling base of users to embrace Digg's social-news model, where users submit headlines and vote on them to determine their ranking on the site. Drapeau confirms what TechCrunch predicted weeks ago — after initially denying it: Users do not want the Netscape brand associated with Calacanis's social-news experiment. But Drapeau continues to stubbornly insist that Netscapers "remain committed to delivering a compelling social news experience for our users." They just don't know when the site will be available, what it will be called, or what they'll do with it.

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's rumor that Netscape would be killed off has proven off the mark. Not because several Netscapers have surfaced to deny the rumors, but because you can't kill something that's already dead. There may be a community that, out of laziness or inertia, still visits its grave daily. But a society of denial-ridden necrophiliacs hardly makes for a compelling audience. When AOL purchased Netscape in 1998, it did everything imaginable to keep the brand alive — and everything imaginable to kill it. It forced the worst features of AOL onto Netscape and migrated the best features of Netscape to AOL — not that it helped either. And Jason Calacanis's brief tenure at AOL? That dirt-grubbing graverobber just made things worse, and then left for greener pastures.

Jason Calacanis and Kevin Rose, interviewed together on the second episode of the GigaOm Show? Of course, the "fur would fly" — or so hosts Om Malik and Joyce Kim promised. Despite recent photographic evidence of a peace accord, Calacanis did, after all, try to undercut Kevin Rose's Digg social-news site with a revamped Netscape during his short tenure at AOL. So, did the claws come out?

What on earth could bring together supposed mortal enemies Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis? Why, Om Malik, of course. Rose is the founder of Digg, and Calacanis, the blowhard entrepreneur who created a Digg clone when he was an executive at AOL. But love has conquered all that. First, there's Malik, the cuddly tech blogger, a friend to all. And, perhaps more importantly, there's Malik's stunning cohost for his new Internet TV show, "The GigaOm Show." Lawyer-turned-videoblogger Joyce Kim, you see, is Calacanis's sister-in-law. Family trumps all. The four were among the stars at a launch party that Revision3, Rose's online-video company, threw for Malik and Kim Wednesday night in the tower of San Francisco's de Young Museum. (Revision3 is producing and distributing the show.) New Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback looks like a weatherman and talks extremely loudly. (My boss has nicknamed him "Jumpin' Jim Louderback.") After the jump, a gallery of photos from the glitzy affair.

Marc Andreessen, founder of the software companies Netscape, Opsware, and Ning, turns 36 on Sunday. Happy birthday, you old fart!

Late to the blogging game and caught in the throes of newbie enthusiasm, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen hasn't yet learned the virtues of thinking before clicking the "Publish" button. Here's the story of the post he quickly came to regret.Andreessen picked up a recent Valleywag item on Microsoft's "people ready" ad campaign. In an ethically questionable deal, Federated Media bloggers agreed to tout the slogan. That, in turn, inspired him to claim that blog.pmarca.com is "so not people-ready." (A Google search still shows the missing post.) The Andreessen of the '90s was a famous Microsoft trash-talker, and this seemed like a reversion to form - but not for long. Almost as soon as he wrote it, he reconsidered and deleted the posting. Could his cowardice have anything to do with the booming business that Opsware, his boring but modestly successful software company, does with the giant of Redmond?

In addition to sporting one of the most hilarious illustrations ever to appear in the Wall Street Journal, the "Wizards of Buzz" article trend piece on social media "influencers" really should be the reddest of red-meat linkbait, right? So how's the article doing on the sites it mentions?

Digg - 420 diggs as of this writing. Not bad, but not stellar. Reaction ranges from congratulatory to disappointment and getting interviewed but not quoted.

Reddit - 82 points. Much investigation into the identify of Reddit user "Adam Fuhrer," a supposed 12-year-old from Toronto. More here.

StumbleUpon - 435 stumbles. Little comment.

Del.icio.us - No sign of the WSJ article getting much bookmark love. 287 bookmarks actually.

Newsvine - 31 votes. Discussion is all citizen-journalish, of course.

Netscape - 95 votes. Commentary somehow devolves into a strange internecine squabble. Jason Calacanis present, though uninvolved in squabble.

"We're on the same trajectory that Digg was at the beginning," Netscape head Jason Calacanis said onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit today about his social news site's main competitor. But that's not what one online stat tracker says. According to Alexa, Netscape's traffic has fallen since he revamped the site, despite Calacanis's claim that they're adding a thousand users a day.

• Damn, YouTube really knows how to play it! After Viacom made the site rip down some videos taken from Comedy Central last week, the two companies talked, and the clips are going back up. [Adweek]

• AOL's Netscape team explains its process of preventing users from gaming the site. Meanwhile, AOL's Weblogs, Inc. team games Netscape competitor Digg. (One Weblogs, Inc. writer tells me that Weblogs, Inc.'s internal mailing list is clogged with requests for Digg/Netscape/Reddit/Del.icio.us votes.) All's fair in love and war, right? [Netscape and Diggforlife]

The latest battle between social site Digg and its copycat Netscape comes from Save Digg, a site that tracks the three Digg users that Netscape hired.

The hacker named "D" didn't really want to write "fuck" in a pop-up when he hacked Netscape.com.

• Now that you've seen cover boy Kevin Rose, check out the whole gallery of sexy young startuppers, including Yelp.com founders Russell and Jeremy, seen here about to sic their dog on some college co-eds. [BusinessWeek]

What happened to the nice Mike Arrington? We don't pretend to know, but now that the formerly friendly TechCrunch blogger has transformed into Fighting Mike, here's a round-up of his feuds and feuds-to-come.

In the war of the social bookmark sites, Digg is the good guy and Netscape is the bad guy, right? According to this reader, Digg is a hive of scum and villainy, and if Netscape becomes one too, it's all the fault of outside marketers. Shane Coffey reports on the covert scam scheme threatening to ruin social bookmarking.

Just a few weeks ago, Netscape head Jason Calacanis offered to pay top users from other social networks like Digg if they defect to Netscape. Jason maintains that he's doing this to reward his best users, not to save a struggling brand by cannibalizing its competitors.

AOL Netscape head Jason Calacanis has started a trend in user-buying. Fashion site StyleHive followed Jason's lead by e-mailing fashion bloggers, asking them to post fashion-related bookmarks on StyleHive for a dollar each.

Early this morning, a few (unpaid) Netscape readers were doin' their thing when two pop-ups...popped up. Tipster and AOL employee Conrad Quilty-Harper notes, "Wisdom of the crowds eh?!"

Right, Netscape head Jason Calacanis will try to spin this one way, and Digg founder Kevin Rose will try to spin it the other. But the real story behind the latest battle of the social bookmarking sites started like this: