Jason Calacanis has left the building. Enter stage left: CK Sample III, the new Managing Editor and Lead Anchor.

It seems that the higher ups have gone with the natural successor to Jason Calacanis, and that’s his right hand man at Netscape — CK. Check out his own blog for more details about the man, but he seems well edjamacated if nothing else. :)

It certainly quashes a few ideas.

#1) Peter Rojas isn’t heading Netscape — duh, and obviously.

#2) AOL isn’t planning to change Netscape.com’s strategy: Clearly, hiring CK means that the higher ups plan to go with Netscape in its current format for at least the short term and possibly the long one as well. CK was hired, it seems like, before Mr. Calacanis’s Weblogs Inc. was purchased by AOL, and has been a mainstay behind the scenes at Netscape if Mr. Calacanis was its public face. Their hiring of Mr. Sample is a clear vote for their faith in Netscape.com’s plan and changes [insert obligatory comparison to Digg].

For those who don’t like to roll up their pants and wade into the comments section of my blog, CK stopped by yesterday to offer a few hints as to what they’re doing to boost Netscape’s membership / traffic:

ME: “But, I guess the question is if you’re only seeing an uptick now, in spite of all of that activity, what else do you have in store to rapidly increase readership?”

CK: Lots.

However, there are two different sets of numbers that are getting confused here: readers and members. Digg is the clear leader in active members on their site, but they didn’t hit their critical mass until closer to the one year old mark (a mark we’re not even halfway to as of yet). So far our member uptake on the site is doing nicely. We’re not stagnating, we’re growing slowly and slowly aggregating more members as friends tell friends etc. This is what happens with social media. It grows slowly at first in active membership and then hits a few booms as everything begins to snowball nicely.

Readerwise, Netscape is still doing pretty damn well. Best of all a lot of our tags are starting to pop up on top search results in Google and other search engines. Right now we’re building good content. Eventually, Google will sniff out that content and our audience will find us.

For example, Roy, who came to us from Digg to be one of our Navigators sniffs out nearly every story having to do with Open Source Software (http://www.netscape.com/member/schestowitz/). He’s not getting many posts to the homepage, but that doesn’t matter and isn’t the point. The point is that all that good information, aggregated in one place under an easy to find tag, is going to eventually find its way via search to the people looking for that information and we’re going to pull that audience in.

We’re planting the seeds for our growth spurts with all the content that is growing on the site. Stay tuned. I have no doubt that we’ll continue to grow nicely.

As an aside, yesterday my post on Netscape was submitted to Netscape — and interestingly enough there were a fair share of detractors for Netscape.com’s current incarnation in terms of submissions. One of them also sort of turned up in the comments of my post as well.

One does wonder whether or not Netscape / CK have any plans to address some of the “old school” Netscaper concerns — or will they simply “301″ redirect them to the AOL site which is far more “traditional”.

I guess the easiest thing would be to dismiss them out of hand or ignore them — which, to be fair, I have no idea what is happening in those communication channels — but the smart thing would be to try and get them back into the fold in some fashion. Surely all those pageviews is something that anyone at AOL/ Netscape would be salivating to get back … email redirects or no.

Could this mean another rejigging of the Netscape front page again? (a blended approach?) Who knows.

But watching what new management does is always exciting when it comes to Social networks. And CK just seems hungry enough to make it an interesting fight.

(unlike the pissing match geek fight that seems to be making the rounds)

tip: Muhammad @ themulife.com

PS: Does anyone know what “CK” stands for?