I was curious about why backfence.com seemed to die such a miserable death seeing as how it was poised to become the facebook of citizen media a couple short years ago. So I just spent some time exploring what's left of it. I actually like the interface, and it seems to have been kept fairly well up-to-date with current Web 2.0 sorts of trends, at least as far as the UI is concerned (that's user interface for all you non-geeks out there). Nice clean look and feel, intuitive navigation, the requisite RSS feeds, etc. But each of the regional microsites within backfence (Bethesda, MD and Arlington, VA were two that I explored) seem to have been abandoned as of June 29, 2007.
Then I stumbled onto the link to the company's Advisory Board:
http://backfence.com/about/index.cfm?page=/investors/advBoard&mycomm=AR
Talk about your old guard warriors! Sorry to be so ageist and maybe sexist (in reverse?), but these guys are too old and stodgy to be driving innovation in citizen media...and where are the women?? Not the type of gang I would expect to be able to stir up interest, participation, and commitment at the local level.
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You need not be old white guys to fail spectacularly. The New Standard styled itself as a Peoples Collective of very diverse and very professional journalists. As you see in the link above, they too went down in flames despite some great, it is said, reporting.
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