Backfence Launches

UPDATED

I'm happy to see that Backfence.com's first community sites have launched (serving McLean and Reston, Virginia). They're off to a good start.

What we're all waiting to see, of course, is what happens down the road. Will they achieve critical mass? Will they be business successes? (One plainly depends on the other.) Will this model scale to a mass of sites that all pretty much run themselves?

Hyper-local is gaining mindshare fast. In addition to Backfence, some news organizations have launched these kinds of sites (see the Northwest Voice and Bluffton Today, both of which are connected to new print publications as well as the "legacy" newspaper companies that run them); more are coming. I'm
also very much looking forward to what Mike Orren and team do with Pegasus News.

They all join projects that have been smartly under way for some time, in places like Roswell, Georgia and Brattleboro, Vermont. The more the merrier.

These are crucial experiments, and my best wishes go with the pathbreakers who are pushing this ahead. We'll all be going to school on each others' work for some time to come.

Comments

[James Shaw]

Dan, I'm disappointed. Why is this news? I've tried talking to you numerous times offlist, with no reply. And still you shun our existing network of 1600+ community web sites.

Perhaps you'll like our sites more when we add even more features like public blogs, comments, etc, etc over the summer (in beta now, privately).

Perhaps we need more members before we qualify? We only have 3,500 members of the public creating content at the moment.

Or perhaps it's just "cool launches" that count, not businesses that have been running for a few years. :-)

[Dan Gillmor]

James, didn't mean to slight your excellent work, and I've updated accordingly.

[Robert Leonard]

James,

Dan's blog is not a place to promote, but a place to learn (IMHO). Readers here, and in other similar blogs tend to be purists, academics, visionaries and liberals with a conservative spin (I call them jounalists - pls no one take offense).

If you have a viable business model, the people to impress are the people you are trying to get to (readers), not your peers or competitors. If you have 3500 regular readers (people that read newspapers read them every day) and have turned those readers into grocery money, you are successful. You have turned a chunk of coal into a diamond.

Good Luck

bob

[Tom Findlay]

Building online communities is problematic over here in Scotland. I'm a blogger in Edinburgh who keeps an eye on tartan e-democracy.

My post The Idiot's guide to citizen networking might interest your readers.

It's here:
http://incunabula.typepad.com/parliament/2005/05/ecommunity_coun.html

[Scott]

Backfence looks great. I think a big part of this explosion of communication which is the Internet should be focused on the municipal or local level, as well as at the national and international level. I used to work for an organization that explored new dimensions in governance and international law, and part of their "platform" was the theory that more governance should be re-allocated from the national level back down to the municipal level. Now before I get too off-topic, I think what Backfence.com can contribute to this goal is to create the forum so that the democratic process at the municpal level can be more effective. And Backfence.com is only one tool in this process, included in that of course are blogs, and other similar sites like that noted by James Shaw.

Cheers,
Scott