Backfence picks up Gillmor’s blog, and expands into SF Bay Area

Backfence, the Vienna, VA company that is building out a network of citizens’ media Web sites for difference cities, says it is acquiring Bayosphere, a site co-founded by former Mercury News reporter and early blogger Dan Gillmor.

The monetary amount wasn’t listed, so the acquisition details are less significant than the fact that Dan is apparently throwing in his lot with Backfence.

Dan, our former colleague, quit the Merc in January of last year, to launch Bayosphere as a citizens’ media project targeted at the San Francisco Bay Area. Dan threw in the towel in January, when the site didn’t find a business model as quickly as he’d wanted, and instead founded the Center for Citizen Media, a think-tank he launched in cooperation with Harvard’s law school and UC Berkeley’s journalism school.

Dan continued to blog, though, and Backfence says the blog will be incorporated into its offerings at this site: www.backfence.com/bayarea. Backfence will launch five new Bay Area community sites, the first of which will be Palo Alto in May, it said.

Bayosphere, which launched in June 2005, says it has close to 100,000 unique visitors per month.

There’s a common tie: Both Backfence and Bayosphere received funding from Omidyar Network, the venture group run by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.