Oh boy, AOL's Digg rip-off is here! (That's unfair. It's more a rip-off of Social Porn.) AOL exec Jason Calacanis links to Flickr'd photos tagged "NNLaunch," where members of his "Project X" work on AOL's "Digg killer." (That's Jason's heavily rumored Netscape revival.)

Overheard: A Debian hacker has nightmares about Google juice and JWZ (Jamie Zawinski, who opened the decidedly non-pubbish DNA Lounge with Netscape IPO money):

In what's probably a strategic leak from AOL, an employee reported on Jason Calacanis's Dulles and NYC office hours (held last Friday). Jason Calacanis's plans to revive the bloated corpse that is Netscape.com were passed to Valleywag, in vague and glowing terms. So to offset my constant petty mockery of the Weblogs, Inc. founder and AOL corporate blogger, here are the deets from his meetings in Dulles and New York:

Wired News runs a trend story (journalism rule #42: three weak stories make a trend story) on antisocial networking. The tipping point: Full-blown parody site Snubster. It's the Hot New Joke (and by "new" I mean "dated as 'I'm Rick James, bitch'") that's turning into a healthy little community. It's not the first joke-cum-business.

A harsh history of Netscape from a tipster called "The Wall's Ear" particularly trashed Jeremy Liew for "running what was a flagging but sustainable Netscape brand into crap." Liew e-mailed ex-co-workers and colleagues, who rallied for him in the comment threads. They were as fiercely protective of the boy as the The Wall's Ear was condemning.

The tipster who panned Jeremy Liew (saying the AOL exec ruined the already dying Netscape brand) wasn't, of course, being fair. So Jeremy (pictured) took matters into his own hands, e-mailing his former Netscape reports and co-workers asking for positive comments on the post.

Today's guest may be in the know, or they may do a great job of faking it. Your call. Here's the e-mail (edited for typos) from a pseudonymous tipster, "The Wall's Ear":

Sometimes, after Valleywag reports on things, they keep happening. Follow-ups to a few recent stories:

PaidContent.org has new deets on Jason Calacanis' upcoming takeover of Netscape.com. The Weblogs, Inc. founder plans to turn Netscape into a Digg-like site.

As always, the wittiest people on Valleywag are the commenters. This week's best:

An urgent missive from a source near AOL confirms: AOL laid off a good chunk of the Netscape team. But, says the tipster, it's not all about rising exec Jason Calacanis:

Jason Calacanis responds to "some speculation" about him getting all up in Netscape's business. I have NO IDEA who speculated that. But the Man Who Would Be AOL CEO says "there are no details to share right now."

TechCrunch lays out an exclusive spread of leaked Google Calendar screenshots. And it looks like...a calendar. Surprise! Calendar apps are about as distinguishable as Nickelback songs.
TC also hears "serious acquisition rumors" about PubSub after the news subscription company replaces its CEO. Who's buying? Probably not Fox.
UK newspaper publisher Johnston Press can't beat its ad drought. Craig Newmark to be blamed by noon.
Microsoft starts testing its Google killer, the least likely David-and-Goliath story since the pro baseball strike.
Our big sister Lifehacker has news on Microsoft's Origami handheld and Google's "total storage" plan in a daily news roundup.
Still waiting for inside confirmation of Jason Calacanis' Netscape takeover. Anyone who leaves the AOL meeting without a job, we're here for ya.

Jason Calacanis, Weblogs Inc. warlord, is poised to take over Netscape.com (it still exists! crazy, I know) at AOL, according to a reliable source. It's crazy enough to be true — we'll see tomorrow morning.

Nice job, Cisco! Sinking $48.5 mil into a use-controlling video machine that even Disney is neglecting? That's forward thinking. [WaPo via TechDirt]
"Companies like Netscape productized the output." Whoa there! "Productized"? You. Yeah, you. Out of the pool. [Inside Firefox]
What if they held a system outage and nobody came? [Blogger Status]
Leave it to Digg to have the "Steve Jobs has no license plate" story covered. [Digg]
Jobs's little white ingot shrinks to 1 GB. [Chicago Tribune]