Monthly Archives: July 2007

RIP Backfence.com

Posted on Thursday, July 5, 2007 by 1 comment

Sorry to see that Backfence just shut down operations.  From the Local Onliner

BackFence announced June 29 that it shuttering its 13 community sites, which were in the DC area, Illinois and northern California. The ambitious site raised an initial round of $3 million, but never had high penetration in its communities, or sold enough Yellow Pages listings or banner ads to be optimistic about its future…

Neighborhood Discussion on MPR

Posted on Wednesday, July 4, 2007 by No comments yet

Minnesota Public Radio interviewed Jay Walljasper about his new book, The Great Neighborhood Book, today.  One-hour call-in show.  Interesting.

Harvard’s List of Social Capital Resources

Posted on Monday, July 2, 2007 by No comments yet

A visitor to this site pointed us to the Saguaro Seminar’s resource page today, which now lists Front Porch Forum among many other entities…

The following is a partial list of some interesting organizations that are about building social capital or harnessing it.

The Saguaro Seminar came out of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and is based at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard…

The project focuses on expanding what we know about our levels of trust and community engagement and on developing strategies and efforts to increase this engagement.

FPF Recognition Growing

Posted on Sunday, July 1, 2007 by No comments yet

Front Porch Forum is the “Featured Website” in the Summer 2007 issue of the Orton Scenarios E-Journal.  Given how influential Orton is in such things… this is wonderful!

Also had a nice short piece in The Islander newspaper this week.  Thanks Lorinda.

And this lovely quote came in today from a Vermont State Representative…

“I love Front Porch Forum. It is such a great way to be connected to different social networks and hear the opinions of my neighbors!”