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The (Almost)* Original Internet Auction Close your eyes and remember back to 1998. Ok, open them again or you won't be able to read the rest of this page. Although less than a decade ago at this writing, it was a very different time on the Internet. It was before the dot-bomb bubble burst, before just about all of the iconic names on the Internet had been coined. Napster had not appeared, no one blogged, and Google was still flagged by a spell-checker as an incorrect spelling for goggle. Janis, of course, has made a habit of being an innovator. When she decided to sell off a lot of her memorabilia (and her mother's, who had recently died) in order to start funding a scholarship at Goddard College, she realized the the Internet would give fans worldwide a chance to participate in this unprecedented event. The problem was, an Internet auction was pretty much uncharted territory. eBay, as we know it, did not exist. There wasn't even a pre-written program that would allow you to run an Internet auction. Not to worry; Janis has always shown great judgment in selecting her webmasters, and Michael Camp, the webmaster at the time, managed to code up his own version of an auction format message board and put it in place on the janisian.com website. Items auctioned ranged from stage clothes to studio charts to first drafts of songs a pair of drinking glasses used in an impromptu brunch with Nina Simone and James Baldwin. At the end of the auction, over $65,000 was raised, which was the seed fund to start the Pearl Foundation. You can see the original Internet Auction pages by clicking here. *In researching this page, we found that actually a small website named auctionweb.com was running at that time, dealing mostly with antiques and computer hardware. Lacking in marketing funds, it would have been a completely a wrong fit for a fan auction of this type, and could not have hoped to pull as many visitors as a major artist site like janisian.com. In any event, the web staff was not aware of their existence. Later, auctionweb.com would change it's name to eBay.com. I think they are actually still around somewhere. |
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