Rock, Paper, Web 2.0
A s a Reston resident and sometime contributor (photos) to Backfence I am curious about the implosion of the company. When it launched I thought it would not succeed because it was dependent entirely on UGC and I couldn't fathom how they could monetize nothing but neighborhood chatter. It quickly became little more than a new delivery system for local politicians and "reviews" of local businesses and services too few in number to have any faith in. Is there a lesson here on how newspapers can fend off what many regard as the inevitability of online supremacy in hyperlocal? So Backfence just plain never caught on, and Scott Karp may have it entirely right that established web 1.0 sites were too much competition for this web 2.0 wannabe to disrupt. He notes that a Google search for "Reston" would not necessarily yield Backfence hits even on the first page, which effectively means that nobody would see them -- but an older, established hyperlocal site, RestonWeb ,