Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Backfence Bringing Blogs to Local

With the tagline, "It's all local," Backfence.com went live tonight in McLean and Reston, Virginia. Backfence aims to become a national network of local sites serving communities around major metro areas with populations of no more than 75,000.

Backfence is seeking to be a kind of ultimate local destination, combining local news, classifieds, community input, local business reviews, Yellow Pages, an entertainment and events calendar and a good deal more. And if it were intended to be a Hollywood movie, Backfence might be pitched as "Citysearch meets Craigslist" with a couple of interesting twists, one of which is the idea that the community will create almost all the content.

Founders Mark Potts and Susan DeFife are using blog and wiki software (without telling users and scaring them away) to help facilitate that and make it as simple as possible for people to participate and provide input.

It addition to its attempt at being a comprehensive local resource, the site also has some unique elements, one of which is a content area called "voices," a local discussion forum.

The site is well designed and visually appealing. It has a personality that will aid it in seeking to gain users and local content creators. Right now the content appears to be all from insiders and those once-removed from insiders. However, it is quite likely that Backfence will catch on relatively quickly and be able to build some loyal usage within a short period of time. That's because its broad, local utility is self-evident.

It must also be said that Backfence is taking on two significant challenges. First, Potts and DeFife are taking a big risk with their heavy reliance on blogging and user-generated content. Second, the idea that they will be able to go head to head as a destination with the portals, directory and local newspaper sites takes a certain amount of chutzpah.

But the reason that Backfence might be able to compete and win in that increasingly crowded field is its local community focus and its comprehensiveness. It's not a local marketplace, or a local newspaper site or a directory site; it combines elements of all three and offers other things not found on any of them.

Backfence's hyper-local focus also may enable the site to develop a devoted following that is willing to generate content and use the site regularly. The local structured data that Backfence has the capacity to offer (assuming users show up and start blogging) is also more relevant and reliable than trying to find information on McLean, VA on a traditional search engine.

Potts and DeFife are taking some chances, but they're also being very smart. It addition to having an enviable cost structure (your users generate all your content), they are selling a range of different types of ads (display, directory, Yellow Pages and sponsorships). Basic classifieds are free. Potts and DeFife also previously told me that they intend to build small, local sales teams in each of their site communities to reach local businesses.

Backfence wants to work with local media companies (e.g., newspapers) to extend their reach down into local communities that they're out of touch with (the WSJ today chronicled the subscription woes of major dailies). In a certain way Backfence has established a model for what local newspaper sites could and maybe should be: comprehensive local portals. But because of legacy and culture issues, it's probably unlikely that newspapers could have developed this model by themselves.

We'll see how many of them now try to imitate it.

Posted By greg at 01:41 AM
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