There was a time when having a website felt like owning a gold mine.
I’ve participated in the Bolder Boulder 10K run since at least 2001. I take movies of everything but the race, including with Elvis.
Back in the late 1990s, the internet was the next big thing. Every day seemed to bring another story about a startup attracting millions of dollars in investment capital with little more than a catchy name and a vague business plan. The dot-com boom was in full swing, and like many people, I wanted to get in on the action.
Around that time, I met a guy named George who had recently moved to Boulder. George was convinced the internet would make him rich. He talked enthusiastically about websites, domain names, and the future of online business. I didn’t entirely understand what he was talking about, but I knew enough to think I needed a website.
I paid George $300 to build one for my entrepreneurial catch-all business, Environmental and Cultural Organization Systems, or ECOS. The project moved at a glacial pace. Eventually, he delivered a rudimentary website that technically existed but wasn’t especially functional.
This is Paige Berry as Georgia O’Keeffe in Ward, Colorado.
It was my first lesson in the economics of web development. Building a website was one thing. Maintaining it was another. The real money seemed to be in the monthly subscriptions, updates, and ongoing support.
Not long afterward, software called Dreamweaver appeared for Mac users. Suddenly, ordinary people could build websites without becoming full-time programmers. Dreamweaver generated HTML templates, and before long, I taught myself enough HTML to be dangerous. It felt empowering. I could create and publish something for the entire world to see.
Looking back, I understand better what created the dot-com bubble. Venture capital was flowing freely into businesses that often had no clear path to profitability. I had my own ambitious ideas.
One involved buying and selling commodities from Mexico, which worked for a while in the early days of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Like countless other internet-era dreams, it sounded promising in theory. In practice, it never gained traction.
My venture in Mexico happened during the 1994 World Cup. The guy in red was my biz partner. He died of stomach cancer a few years later.
Eventually, the bubble burst. Investors stopped throwing money at bad ideas. The easy capital dried up. The internet didn’t disappear anytime soon, but the fantasy that every website would become a fortune certainly did.
The experience reminded me of an old saying about the Gold Rush. The only people who made the most money, sold supplies to the miners. Levi Strauss comes to mind.
George understood that lesson better than most. Instead of chasing internet startups, he bought domain names. Batteries. Milk, Carpets. Anything he thought someone might someday want. Then he marked them up and sold them. He also made a good living setting up computers for people, taking them from the box to the desktop for a few hundred dollars per job. As far as I can tell, both businesses are still thriving in one form or another.
My grandfather Ohashi was a pool shark. This image made the cover of “Nishigawa Neighborhood.”
Over the years, I built websites for my projects, events, organizations, books, and documentaries. Every new idea required its own domain name. At first, my websites felt organized. Eventually, they became expensive and unwieldy when the next project came along.
It’s not like my creative entrepreneurship led to anything like Netflix, although it almost did, but that’s another story. When each domain costs around twenty dollars a year, dozens of websites can add up quickly.
So I consolidated.
Rather than maintain a collection of aging websites scattered across the internet, I collapsed them into a single page I call the Website Graveyard. It’s a resting place for projects that have run their course but still deserve to be remembered.
My experience in a CU study on activity and social interactions became the subject of an Aging Gratefully documentary.
Recently, I donated my personal, public, and professional papers to the American Heritage Center. Included in that collection is my digital life. Through the Website Graveyard, visitors can still access those old sites.
I hadn’t looked through them in quite a while. Wandering through those pages was like opening a digital time capsule. There were forgotten projects, old photographs, abandoned ideas, and snapshots of who I was at different points in my life.
I never made a fortune from my dot-com ventures. No venture capitalists came calling. No public offerings appeared on the horizon.
My websites preserved memories. After all these years, that may be worth more than the fortune I was chasing in the first place.
This is a scene from “A Little Bit of Discipline,” which was shot, in part at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center by Powell, Wyoming.
A Little Bit of Discipline – My second movie shot on location in Boulder and at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center.
Aging Gratefully – A series of documentaries about cohousing and the power of community.
Art of the Hunt – An exhibit at the Wyoming State Museum.
Artlink Commons – This is a current project about how artists can sell more art by working together.
Best Chance Media – This is a current project that publishes books for rejected writers. Someone will have to take over this project.
Cordially, Georgia O’Keeffe – Georgia O’Keeffe and her sister, Claudia, spent the summer of 1917 in Ward, Colorado. The documentary is based on a thank-you note she sent to her host, Hazel Schmoll.
“Dutch Hop” was a nightmare of a project, partly because I was on my deathbed during post production.
Dutch Hop Documentary – Boulder Community Media received an NEA grant for this project, which never ended. The delay sparked a funding controversy when state funds were used to finish it.
ECOS – Environmental and Cultural Organization Systems was my first venture into entrepreneurial consulting. I was part of the gig economy before it became fashionable. ECOS combined my interests in the social and hard sciences, which I pursued as my major at Hastings College.
Nebraska Community Media – At one time, Boulder Community Media was set up to do business in Nebraska. I had applied for grants from Humanities Nebraska, none of which came to fruition. Nebraska didn’t take kindly to carpetbaggers.
Occupy Wall Street: Wyoming, USA – There was a national progressive movement that emerged after the 2008 economic crash. The 99 percent vs the 1 percent clash began at this time.
The gas station where Kerouac slept off his night in Cheyenne in Longmont, is now a restaurant.
On the Trail: The Jack Kerouac Digital Scroll Project – I made a short movie about the night Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, spent in Cheyenne on his road to Denver. The idea was to assemble works that covered his entire trip, which began in New York City. Humanities Nebraska denied my proposal twice about Paradise’s trek across the state.
Shall We Dance – This was my first stab at HTML. Angelfire hosted it. I checked on it today and learned that angelfire shut down in 2026. I retrieved it using the Wayback Machine.
The Shootout Cheyenne – Michael Conti and I organized a filmmaking festival. Teams had 24-hour to make a seven-minute movie. The event became obsolete with the advent of digital cameras and smartphone cameras.
Views from Behind the Lens – This is my personal site. It began when I ran for Boulder City Council.
This is me in 2014 at Silver Sage Village.
Where Wisdom Comes of Age – When I moved into Silver Sage Village, I volunteered to build a community website.
Whistlestop F.I.L.M. Festival – The Shootout Cheyenne evolved into the Whistlestop, which allows for movie editing.
Wyoming Community Media – WCM is still a registered corporation in Wyoming. WCM and BCM still applies for grants in Wyoming.
