A growing number of efforts are joining Philly Future in attempting to provide tools their local community can use to communicate, share news, and connect.

Backfence.com‘s launch, in particular, has raised a stir from folks in various corners of the web.

Dan Gillmor: Backfence Launches

A VC: Hyperlocal – Backfence vs 101

Jay Rosen: More on the Migration: Developments and Sightings

Steve Outing: Citizen-Journalism Site Backfence Debuts

An editted repost of a comment I left at “A VC”:

I feel Roland Tanglao’s efforts at Bryght are very important: they show just how far barriers have gone down and infrastructures have gone up that enable anyone with little technical know how, or money, to start a site these capabilities.

I run Philly Future (http://www.phillyfuture.org) on a related toolset (CivicSpace) to what Bryght provides – and I have ran it with a small team of volunteers for a very, very long time (various incarnations since 1999 – community aggregator since January 2004 – open participation since mid 2004).

We feature the headlines of over a 100 regional blogs and feeds, and encourage direct, original works to be published to the site – it’s an effort to provide service to our community much like that of the other great sites mentioned here. Very similar to the 101s (which I love as Roch Smith – their founder – knows), but with a slightly different model: While we provide a river of news aggregator – the focus for us is editorializing our regional web – their focus is a pure representation of the community via it’s river of news.

It’s great to see so many other efforts exploring this space now. It recalls the Sidewalk/Digital Cities/RealCities portals larger companies pursued a few years back. The crucial difference is the flow reversal: It’s the communities themselves who are being empowered to determine what is the news and become collective owners of these sites.

Compliments to NowPublic as well – I think they are helping explore and build the infrastructure for distributed journalism.