A new neighbor has moved into an old house in the 'hood, renovated the place and promises to be part of the community -- going to PTA meetings, Little League games, community centers and talking to local activists. But the guy you know and love will still come back and visit. Vienna, Virginia's Backfence has acquired Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere, garnering further citizen-media cred and a new market! Susan Mernit scooped the blogosphere yesterday morning,......

Dan Gillmor bows out of Bayosphere in Businessweek -- reactions from JD Lasica, Jonas Luster and Thomas Hawk. Blogger Tom Foremski says he's doing just fine, claiming to be more popular with PR folks than the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg. Hey, at least no one has had to resort to astroblogging (astroturfing + blogging, natch). John Paczkowski is afraid, very afraid about rumors that boo.com is back. "Best Headline in a While" award......

Last things first: When we signed off with a hearty "Happy SFisting" last month, we didn't think we were conjuring up a column, but it looks like that's what's happened. We're feeling a little amazed by our own power, and wondering if we could pull off the same trick twice... Now, what to say between here and the magical final words? Things have grown a bit dimmer here in the Office of the SFist......

Well, it's official -- Dan Gillmor's "citizen journalism" project is here -- and it's called Bayosphere. Well get to that in a second. First, we'll let Dan introduce the project in his own words: The promise of the Internet was simple, but incredibly powerful: to be a medium through which we could connect and collaborate, for mutual benefit. It's happening. As the Net matures, we are learning to write as easily and fluently as......

Well, we'd reported on kerfuffle between Apple Computer and a few punk bloggers (AKA Apple v. Does) before, but now there have actually been some legal developments in the case. And while it doesn't look good, it's not entirely hopeless yet, either. At stake is something that SFist holds very dear to our heart -- the concept that bloggers have what journalists working in any other medium have, namely, journalistic privelege. We have our......

Finally. A goddamn invitation to a real party with real f**king stars. Like Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders who were nice enough to give us Peter A.'s email to RSVP. These, friends, are stars. Love them. Gossip about them. But mostly, read them. Oh, there were more stars, but we had to bump them out of respect. Hell, we ran into our unemployed blogger hero Dan Gillmor talking to Craig Newmark tonight and were......

Nothing like media-business wonkery, news aggregation and browser-based application design to get a blogger all hot and bothered. Thanks to Susan Mernit, Beth Laing of Mediacenter invited us to their Emerging Technology Conference. Okay, not really. We just got invited to the casual dinner at Yahoo, where they plied us with booze and chicken and then tried to take advantage of our post-prandial trance to slip some PowerPoint slides by us. Little did they......

So Carly Fiorina is no longer the most powerful woman in business, or at least, the most powerful employed woman in business. Hewlett-Packard let her go today after months of speculation that there would be a shakeup. Quoted in the Merc, "While I regret the board and I have differences about how to execute HP's strategy, I respect their decision...HP is a great company and I wish all the people of HP much success......

The ghost of Malcolm Gladwell has come to haunt Silicon Valley tastemakers. You know those schwag-bags you're always hearing about on Defamer? It's all part of massaging the 'Connectors,' the folks of style and influence who supposedly have more to do with wildfire word-of-mouth sales than the rest of us schmucks. The latest effort is to identify techies and tech journos who's off-hand endorsement of a product can mean an explosion in market share. Bloggerstars......

It's good to be a nerd. At least that's how SFist feels after hanging out at the Swedish American Hall, taking full advantage of the open bar, nodding our head to the DJ's beats, nibbling on tidbits from the trays of finger food and stuffing our bag with schwag at the Creative Commons party last night. Intellectual property lawyers sure know how to party! Lawrence Lessig, everyone's favorite copyright law reform advocate and Stanford law......

It's been a while since our last Get Ur Geek On, so we've got a lot of hottness today and will use a bullet list, power-point style, because our attention spans have begun to shrivel in inverse proportion to our abdomen's expansion: Dan Gillmor, the last top tech writer standing at the San Jose Mercury News, has decided to leave the Knight-Ridder corporate family to become a 'Citizen Journalist.' Is that a fancy term for......