The First Finger Lakes dot Net
The first Finger Lakes dot Net was launched in Jaunary 1995. It was a private, low-key venture with no large agenda. A few bed and breakfast operators paid for links from the site.
Search engines came along a few years later and Finger Lakes dot Net generally had the highest placement for searches using the obvious Finger Lakes words such as "Finger Lakes", or another spelling, "Fingerlakes".
We were driven nuts for 14 years by how prominent the website was yet how little it offered. In 2005 we launched an effort to make it an informative, but not commercial, site with pages about local entrepreneurs, artists, and other persons and orgnaizations of note. This was too ambitous.