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Backfence.com, which recently purchased Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere as a strategy for entering the Bay Area market, formally launched its first Bay Area site for Palo Alto with the hire of two former newspaper staffers, Daniel Payomo and Mark Loundy. Media maven Dan Gillmor continues blogging on the site.
Backfence has always been one of the more nicely put together sites in an increasingly competitive world of Internet companies combining user-generated content and local advertising. A recent redesign has made the site simpler to use, replacing many tabs with a kind of three-pronged navigation: "post, review, shop."
Backfence, though slower to roll out than some of its competitors, has several things going for it: a hyperlocal strategy (limiting the geographic scope to very clear, local communities), a range of content types (not simply advertising) and, as I mentioned, a polished but not-too-slick design. The hyper-local strategy ensures a community identification that may speed adoption and make it preferred vs. larger entities. Also the cost structure of the company and its almost exclusive reliance, like other similar sites, on user-generated content gives it an advantage vs. traditional media.
Virtually all the social-directory sites are on angling for acquisition by some larger media company. And in that regard they're on something of a collision course. This is yet another small business advertising opportunity and yet another classifieds marketplace. I'm a fan of Backfence, but the question is: how many of these sites (in addition to yellow pages and newspaper classifieds) can local markets support?
Screenwerk 
June 15, 2006 at 11:17 pm
Greg. I’m delighted to see a fellow traveler making similar observations on the major media shift going on right before our eyes. Take a look at my new blog sadbastards.wordpress.com
June 16, 2006 at 5:38 am
Backfence is doing some interesting things in getting the local community to engage in talking about thier neighborhood. It is tough to get going without traffic though. In some ways, Topix has taken the opposite approach of building traffic and then getting the local community to build new content.
It should be interesting to watch. I can say that our local merchant community would certainly be interested in the inventory they create if they have significant traffic.