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Lycos releases a new social Web publishing application to letconsumers build Web sites.

Lycos, the surviving search portal owned by Korea's DaumCommunications, is making a new entr onto the Web today withWebon, a Web publishing platform for consumers that leverages theOpenSocial API Google created to socialize the Internet.

Webon is powered by an OpenSocial wrapped social engine thatpowered the failed Lycos Circles community offering from 2005.

Lycos believes it is a more viable solution than Adobe'sDreamweaver, Microsoft's Office FrontPage and Web Expression or anyother Web site creation platform for the current Web 2.0environment we find ourselves in.

"Most of the current Web 2.0 or Web site building tools letyou build a nice looking static Web page with text and images, butthey are missing the truly dynamic interactive social aspects thatyou should be able to build with a Web site building tooltoday," Lycos CTO Don Kosak told me.

To give you perspective on Web creation tools, there was a timewhen only programmers could build Web sites. Eventually users witha yearning to put a site up online started learning HTML and toolsto build their sites. These tools cost a few hundred dollars anddon't typically provide for easy updates or social interaction.

For example, users who want to use Dreamweaver to add social assetsto the sites they create would have to "become systemsintegrators," Kosak said.

Forget the site-building tools and HTML coding. Webon lets userswith no technical training beyond using a word processing programcreate full-bodied Web sites with a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop interfaceand text and photo editing tools.

Users have their Web site on their screen and click and typedirectly on the page. Users can also integrate blogs, wikis, photoalbums and widgets from other sites, and save changes as they makethem.

This rich Internet application supports apps compatible withOpenSocial, which could be quite a few as Google's OpenSocial-based

Friend Connect tool catches on.

Webon also enables profiles with activity streams that let visitorstrack site updates; supports OpenID for blog and photo albumcomments, as well as participation in the blogosphere through RSS,pinging and trackback functionality.

Kosak told me that Webon is for "mass market consumers."Lycos is offering it as a "fremium" model, meaning it isfree for each consumer to construct up to first six Web sites andincludes the storage space to run 300 photos across those sixsites.

Lycos also offers for $8.95 a month a Webon plan that includes onedomain name to publish your site on, unlimited photo storage andeventually, video support.

I did a double take upon hearing this. Here is my issue and I stillcan't get my head around it. I asked Kosak if consumers reallywanted to launch six Web sites. He said that early Lycos tests ofWebon showed that consumers got hooked; once they created one siteand launched it with ease, they wanted to create more.

I understand the addictive nature of the Web but this isridiculous. Six Web sites per person?! That is madness.

It reminds me of that sobering scene in Jurassic Park where JeffGoldblum's character Ian Malcolm condemns the  manufacturing ofdinosaurs by mankind, noting "Your scientists were sopreoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop tothink if they should."

No, we shouldn't enable lay users to create more than two Websites. There's no need to clutter the Web, which is littered withenough garbage.

On the whole though, Webon, is a cool tool and should gaintraction. Time will tell if Lycos will make money from this latestattempt at community building after Circles failed four years ago.