Dan Gillmor, author of the book We The Media, quit his job as tech columnist for the San Jose Mercury News a bit more than a year ago to start Bayosphere, a citizen journalism experiment. His backing was blue chip: Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and the Mozilla Foundation, and the Omidyar Network, headed by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay.

But now it's over.

Dan explains why, sort of, in the post that leads at that Bayosphere link. I think he comes closest here:

Although the participants -- citizen journalists and commenters -- are essential, it's even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants. They're looking for the proverbial "clean, well-lighted place" where they can learn or be entertained, or both.

We are reactive. Much as they may rail against the media, not many busy people want to chase news stories as a hobby and contribute them to someone else's site.

Here at projo.com, we attach an anonymous survey form to our lead story and everybody has an opinion. It's fun to spout off anonymously, and even more fun to read what's really going on in the heads of apparently civilized Rhode Islanders. But unless an issue affects or offends you personally, it's unlikely you've been dying to be an unpaid reporter and just had no place to put your work.

Dan has now moved his blogging -- his style is recognizable no matter where he writes it -- to a nonprofit venture he will head, the new Center for Citizen Media, whose mission he outlines here. Mainly, it will support others' efforts. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School will support Dan.

Dan and I have a nodding online acquaintance, occasionally pointing to each other's posts, and he was kind to mention me in We The Media as an early mainstream-media blogger,

I'd drop by to see what was happening from time to time, but Bayosphere had a vacant feeling, in part because it's hard for one person to launch a community site and think folks will come, and in part, I think, due to the use of Drupal software. Even a well-done, successful Drupal site with tech-savvy participants seems odd to me: Urban Vancouver's homepage and blogs page are almost identical; the sides change. (Nice houseboat pic here, though.)

(I spent hours last summer fruitlessly configuring a Drupal site. The community software uses a complex set of roles, permissions and taxonomies that couldn't easily be bent to do what we wanted: host a cluster of separate blogs. Every post is a free-floating item that can be served up in many ways. This permission screen suggests the problem: Even if you make a "class" called "blogger," everyone in that class could post to everyone else's blog. Since the blog entries were accessed from an alphabetical dropdown list of blogs, everyone would have accidentally posted to Art's Notebook sooner or later. Making every blogger a "class of one" would require a permission screen stretching east to Cape Cod. We use Movable Type here.)

The lively, familiar look of Dan's new site (it uses WordPress) is more inviting. Commenters on Dan's farewell post seem to agree: There's commiserating and amiable analysis of what didn't happen, but no protests about what's been lost.

Wishing Dan well...

Turning readers off:
TimesSelect Draws About 156,000 Web-Only Subs in First 4 Months. Editor & Publisher. The number angry at the Times for walling off its columnists is probably far larger. Yes there is life after Maureen Dowd. And Frank Rich is taking a leave until "at least April" to write a book.

I'd love to think that means the Times plans to drop the wall then, but don't bet on it.