Punk music has been core to my being since I was 12 or 13. This was also the age I started getting into this thing called the internet with my trusty IBM PS-1 and AOL account
Soon after armed with a scanner, MS Paint and a most basic self taught knowledge of HTML I began to build basic pages for my band and my friends bands. Natrually I built a hub site and began expanding the links and show dates to go past our local region to start to encompass the state, making the first punk music scene resource for the state of florida, and back in 1995 possibly even the first local music resource for the state as well.
As things progressed I built out an online store stocked w/ my friend's merch and with the proceeds we tried to launch a co-op record label ala Factory Records. Run by teenagers and with little concern for things like "profit" needless to say it didn't work out - much like the real Factory label, only we never got as far. We would use the proceeds to pay for studio time and would use them to set up gigs, but we were equally as apt to use it for beer money or ramen noodles.
It was fun while it lasted but long term it didn't work out and broke apart sometime in 1998. By then other sites had started to spring up and local rags like Creative Loafing -
Weekly Planet realized to survive they were going to need to have a web presence too.
If was still a fruitful venture. Through the project I was offered an internship w/ MTV in 1997 & one of my friends / partners involved went on to play guitar in a band some of you may have heard of called Against Me.
Its weird seeing one of your buds on tshirts in the mall, but still not quite as weird as seeing yourself as a kids meal toy in Wendy's
