Scott Karp has a nice post on hyperlocal and the Backfence failure. He notes:

“There’s been a lot of debate about what killed Backfence, the hyperlocal news site. Was it poor design? Lack of incentives for users to generate content? Bad business model? Maybe all of these contributed.

But what really killed Backfence was Google and Web 1.0.”

Scott then goes on to display the results of Google queries for local towns and the older but apparently useful (or useful enough) sites that exist today. So will hyperlocal come from a new brand or the extension of an existing one?

My bet is the latter. From somewhere like Craigslist or local newspapers (if they had more guys like Rob Curley @WaPo running the show.

How about Marchex and their 100,000 zip code domains – will this be the true hyperlocal play?