Go read the descriptions of Backfence’s acquisition of Bayosphere at CyberJournalist.net, Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, and Yelvington.com.

I did, and I’m asking myself some questions these posts didn’t answer.

First, why should anyone care that one lame loser is taking over another?

Second, what's the reality of Backfence?

The reality, as I see it, after spending some time at the Bethesda site, is that this particular back fence has been spectacularly successful at keeping the neighbors out and a failure at everything else. It’s a virtual ghost town.

If you get lonely in Bethesda, head on over to McLean, VA and click Right now to see what was going on months ago that no one cared to comment on. The 4 most recent posts in Right now are dated April 3, March 15, March 13 of this year and November 7 of last year.

My third question is whether losing touch with reality is an occupational hazard of being in the media business these days, and when that hazard’s going to whack me, if it hasn't already?

Our unique visitor count increased by nearly 50% in February from January, to over 15,000. Page views tripled during the same period, to over 375,000.

We expect continued sharp increases in traffic, corresponding to our rapidly increasing volume of user- and staff-written content.

For now, our focus is still on adding content and expanding our audience. A strong focus on revenue will begin down the road.

We’ve just finalized a common content architecture for our journals (blogs), forums, guides / lists and advertiser-generated content.

All location-based content, which will be the overwhelming bulk of our content, will fall into one of the 30 broad area groups into which we’ve divided southern Wisconsin, Northern Indiana, and the 7-county Chicago metropolitan area.

All of the more than 350 suburban communities and most of the approximately 250 Chicago neighborhoods have been assigned to area groups.

Within the week, visitors to Yo Chicago will have a clearer picture of the scope of our ambition, and we can begin rapidly expanding the amount of content we offer.

Over at Publishing 2.0 Scott Karp is wondering whether “the long tail is a lit fuse."

Does every ever-expanding universe eventually slow or collapse? Of course it does, including the rapidly-expanding universe of online journals that the more pretentious among us (you know who you are) refer to as “the blogosphere."

Karp has some interesting stats that suggest that this universe of legitimate journals may already be contracting, if you carve “spam blogs" out of the overall numbers.

He suggests that this is no surprise, given the difficulty of writing an online journal over a period of time, and the absence of any financial reward for most of the writers.

How is all this relevant to Yo Chicago’s business model, which depends on enlisting large numbers of unpaid volunteers to write about their neighborhoods and on topics they know well?

We expect that most of our volunteers will be volunteering with the goal of making a buck, in one way or another. Some will see a return; many won’t.

I think that there are far more opportunities for journal writers to benefit economically and non-economically than Karp seems to have factored into his thinking.

People writing about their neighborhood may be seeking to accelerate the appreciation in their property, or slow its depreciation if we’re in a bubble, or simply connect with like-minded people. Smart real estate agents will be looking to learn new ways of marketing their services and their listings in an increasingly fragmented and dysfunctional media universe. And so on.

Karp’s coming at this, though, from a different perspective: hoping for the survival of media brands as quality content reasserts its dominance in a less-cluttered universe. Not gonna happen, in my opinion. A lot of people are willing to invest a lot of energy over a long period of time in seeking an elusive reward, if it appears to be large enough.

There's no doubt that video and audio content is growing explosively, and that the growth will only accelerate.

Among the key drivers are easy-to-use tools, increasing broadband penetration, cheap digital cameras with motion picture and sound capabilities built in, cell phones that can capture video, and efficient mechanisms such as Google Video and YouTube for sharing and discovery. And, of course, the fact that people love to look at videos.

Video and audio will eventually be integral parts of YoChicago.

While we figure out how to make that happen, we'll be linking frequently to neighborhood videos around the Web. See, for example, this post on our Wicker Park journal, and this one on YoChicago Today.

I’m not sure what to make of Jeff Jarvis’ call for readers to suggest, for a Blogictionary, words that are used by people who write frequently updated online journals.

My first theory is that he’s inviting his readers to make fools of themselves by opting in to patently ridiculous coinages.

Come to think of it, I don’t have another theory.

New Homes Magazine and Yo Chicago are now live, in skeletal form. Some of the links work, some are placeholders only.

We’ll be adding tons of flesh to this skeleton in the coming hours, days, weeks and months, but enough is online already for the diligent reader to understand what we’re doing: creating an entirely new form of housing and neighborhood information source.

The search interface for our soon-to-be-renamed highrise guide, with its easy switching between map and grid views, is the identical search interface that will power rentals, for sale properties, news releases, neighborhood information, and much more as we progress.

The question of the day is whether to allow real estate agents to write for YoChicago journals.

Earlier today I authorized setting up accounts for two real estate agents, one in West Lakeview, one in Andersonville, and actively welcomed their participation. So that’s where I stand on the question.

The publisher has a different view. He believes that agents will use the journals to promote themselves in such a stupid and shameless fashion that they’ll taint the entire enterprise and drive away readers. He also doesn’t believe that, on their own, real estate agents have much of anything to say that anyone wants to read.

He’s thoroughly absorbed the journalistic ethos, which holds as a bedrock principle the quaint notion that writing for the sole or even primary purpose of attracting business, which is presumably why real estate agents want to do this, guarantees that the writing won’t reach an audience.

In the dim, distant past I spent a good chunk of time going around the country, under the auspices of the American Management Association and other organizations, lecturing corporate managers on the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, and writing articles on the subject. My sole purpose in doing so was to attract business for the large law firm I serfed at.

I didn’t have then, nor have I developed since, a passion for statutes relating to consumer product warranties. I don’t think there’s much risk that I ever will.

Hardly anyone in the audience had any doubt that the main reason I was speaking was to hustle their business. Most of them had at least two objectives in attending (a trip to Akron or Waterloo or Cincinnati or Birmingham wasn’t a draw): to gain some knowledge on the subject and to see whether I was someone they might want to hire.

I don’t agree with the journalistic bias that sees a commercial motive as getting in the way of imparting or seeking information. I think hardly anyone agrees, or even thinks the question merits consideration.

Are real estate agents able to focus on what information people value, and communicate it to them in way that they’re receptive to? Most aren’t. I agree with the publisher that stupid aggression, manipulating people’s fears and juvenile self-promotion are all that most agents have to offer.

My experience tells me, however, that quite a few agents know how to gain business in a professional way.

I’ll gamble that we’re attracting those agents to write for us. If I’m wrong in any instance, we’ll try to show the agents a better way to gain business in the context of our journals. If any agents prove to be uneducable – and some will - we’ll politely suggest that they may have better ways to spend their time.

I don’t expect the journalist in the publisher to be swayed by any of my arguments. The Medill School of Journalism succeeds surpassingly well at infecting the best of its graduates with a blind and unshakable faith in the journalistic creed of objectivity, and a firm belief that people only want to read what journalists deem worthy of reading.

Most journalists (my publisher not included) have a profound and abiding contempt for real estate agents. They view them as adversaries who are trying to hide any unpleasant realities from the journalist’s readers.

Real estate agents see journalists as adversaries who are trying to hide any pleasant realities from their readers. If the message is all positive, it's not a very good story.

Two wary opponents, circling each other, each trying to shape the story. One pretends to objectivity, the other doesn’t. Which is more dishonest?

Let’s see what the agents can do, rather than deciding the question in advance the way journalists pretend not to have done. Let the readers decide.

Have spent a number of 16-hour days immersed in the screen-by-screen details of the soon-to-launch, YoChicago rebranding and rebuilding of NewHomes1.

We're using blogging software (WordPress 2.0) for major pieces of the site, and have been describing those pieces as blogs.

The terminology of blogging, Blogspeak, has been causing me increasing discomfort, in part because of the many ways in which the words fail to resonate with far too many people whose cooperation I need, in part because of the attitudinal problems and warped agendas of far too many denizens of the so-called blogosphere.

So, I'm (mostly) swearing off Blogspeak in public venues, and striking all the references to blogs from the new Web sites.. Wonder how easy it will be to get the staff here to go along with this change?

Tom Brown’s sentiments on the dean of Christ Church, Oxford, anticipate my feelings about the word "blog."

I do not love thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this alone I know full well,
I do not love thee Doctor Fell.

I’m not as perturbed by the word as another writer, to whom it sounds like the ejection of a "lump of yellowy-green snot."

The word disturbs, in part, because of its idiotic variations, e.g. blogosphere, and because using it puts one at risk of being associated with some of the better-known denizens (you know who you are) of the blog world, and their cultish, adolescent obsession with its neologisms. Think: "I didn’t know the cool words or the cool kids when I was in high school, but I do now."

The word’s attractive, on the other hand, because it makes explaining some things to some people a lot easier. But not, yet, enough people to warrant the risk.

We’re in the process of involving hundreds of people in helping with our YoChicago "blogs." Many of those people have either never heard the term or it has no resonance for them. I’m asking them to write brief items on Web sites that they can update quickly and instantly, and that people can easily find, subscribe to and comment on. Those Web sites are like journals, but in reverse chronological order,