I live in Mill Valley, California. It's a small town about twelve miles north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate.
During the late-60's and 70's, Mill Valley was a haven for refugees from the disintegrating San Francisco hippie scene. It had a reputation for being laid back and easy going. 'Hot-tub culture' took root here. Sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll helped define the town's identity, assisted in no small part by the army of musicians who made the town their home.
During the "Decade of Greed", Mill Valley suffered rampant property inflation. The outside world's perception of the town changed. "Hippie culture" was transformed into "yuppie culture". The narrow streets which wind up the valley sides became jammed with BMWs and Mercedes Benzes. Kids were carpooled to school in "off-road-sport-utility-vehicles" and the ubiquitous Volvo station wagons rather than VW buses. Downtown transformed itself, from a functional purchasing place to a Disneyfied mini-mall of chi-chi boutiques, expensive restaurants and "gift shops". The town became known globally as the place where the mountain bike was invented.
Despite the sense of insularity which seemed to pervade this vision of yuppie heaven, Mill Valley was not immune to events in the greater cosmos. Corporate downsizing resulted in an explosion of small, home-based businesses. As the Internet exploded, Mill Valley's online presence kept pace. Home pages proliferated. The town earned the (unsubstantiated) reputation as being the second most heavily "wired" place in California. Chamber of Commerce meetings were overrun with Web Page "designers" touting for custom.
I joined in.
During late 1995, curious things started happening. The local paper, the Mill Valley Herald, informed the world of the existence of "
millvalley.com", a "virtual community". At about the same time, the Marin Independent (sic) Journal (owned by Gannett Newspapers) ran an article on "
gomillvalley.com", a - you've guessed it - "virtual community". The Mill Valley Chamber of Commerce was rumored to be assembling its own - well, to coin a phrase - "virtual community".
I was curious. I ran "Mill Valley" through Digital's
Alta Vista search engine. It pulled up about 5,000 references, and gave me about 200 pages. This was a lot of references for a town with a population of about 13,000. For the purposes of comparison, I performed the same exercise for "San Rafael". San Rafael is about 12 miles north, has a population of around 50,000 and is the economic and political hub of Marin County. Alta Vista's search yielded about 10,000 mentions and listed about 200 pages.
Perhaps Mill Valley WAS the "second most wired town in California".
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "wired".
I checked out "millvalley.com". On the homepage, several sections were listed. I headed for "Business". The section headings seemed strangely familiar. Oh yes, the Yellow Pages. There were a few businesses listed. I checked out several of them. They were almost all the same - "cookie-cutter" web pages. Scrolling down, I found an eMail address. It led me to
First Step Research, based in Moscow, Idaho.
As my business wasn't listed in the Mill Valley "Business Community", I asked to be included. The next morning, a Monday, I got a mail back, telling me I had been added to the list of Mill Valley businesses (under "Advertising"), and informing me that my particulars had been forwarded to one Ross MacLeod, who was First Step's local representative.
"Wow!" I thought "Great service!"
copyright 1996 FeNiX
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