Local (and, “hyperlocal”) company Backfence is shutting down it’s 13 community news sites in a few days. Check out the comprehensive write-up at Screenwerk, Terry Heaton has a great “lessons learned” post, and Scott Karp writes Wrong On Hyperlocal: Google And Web 1.0 Killed Backfence.

Here is what was posted to the Mclean site:

Despite it’s failings, these sites have users, which means that there is room for someone to play “benevolent vulture” and take advantage of this new vacuum and serve these users. It’ll be interesting to see if that happens, and who does it.

Of course, I’d like to see users take matters into their own hands.

I wrote a response to the Mclean farewell post, where a user had asked about what happens next, with a few ideas:

>I haven’t really contributed to this community much, but I pay attention to stuff like this. If I were an active Backfence contributer, I would:

>- Set up a mailing list (on groups.google.com, perhaps) for coordinating with other contributers, and make sure everyone knows about it.

>- Encourage everyone who was writing on Backfence Mclean to set up a blog (it’s easy, at wordpress.com or blogger.com) and post the kind of stuff they used to write here. Also encourage everyone to link to each other, both in their “blogroll” (list of favorite blogs) and in new posts (to refer or respond to what someone else wrote).

>- Find a geek interested in such things (like me, contact details at rossnotes.com) to put together a site that pulls everyones blog posts into a single page.

I should have added another: use flexible, best-of-breed tools for things like events, photos, and classifieds (like upcoming.org, Flickr, and Craigslist.)

(title quote comes from a Mark Potts comment on the Screenwerk post)

see also: Jeff Jarvis on The Local Challenge.