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With little fanfare or celebration,
July marks Wrapped IN Wire's 5th year in existence. WIW
was founded, in its current incarnation, in July
1997. What most people don't know, or remember, is that that
is when we officially launched, but for almost a year before that,
the site started taking shape on my personal webspace, as "The
Book of Rabies and Daniac".
The idea
behind that concept was the same: An extensive collection of industrial
(and related) music reviews, to help
people find new music, and/or what to avoid. I had come up with
this neat little "notepad"
style design, with lined paper backgrounds. It was very "first
generation".
By the
time we launched the site publicly, we had renamed it to Wrapped
IN Wire, a name that was originally an idea for a band name (had
we ever formed a band, that is). We had accumulated by then, almost
300 reviews. By the year's end, we had a total of 361 reviews
already.
Then on May 27, 1998 we registered
our domain name. I can't recall when we ditched the notebook design
(although you can still see the original notebook "cover"
graphic in use as our background image right now!) 1998 is also
when we started archiving news updates. *See
what the site looked like in November 1998*
At
the end of 1999, we joined an affiliate
network called Bla-Bla (now part of UGO.com). At the
time there were promises of free hosting, banner ad revenue, and
site promotions to help generate traffic. Our revenue was pitiful.
Then we were offered thousands of dollars to have the site bought
by another site affiliate company. The catch was that the payment
was in shares. We opted to pass on that offer. By end of 2000,
our brief flirtation with banner ads and big business came to
an end. There is no money to be made from a site like this. (And
that affiliate site that offered us shares, went out of business
in a short time).
 We
currently stand at 727 CD reviews
(with dozens more waiting to be posted), covering over 459 [mostly]
non-mainstream bands. The site has seen better days, what with
our forum gone awry, and infrequent updates, but we are still
here and we are not going away!
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