Regular readers of this blog will notice a lot of posts about LorainCounty.com. So, to avoid any confusion and to be completely transparent, I thought I should include a post about the relationship between Emerge Inc. and LorainCounty.com.
The simple answer:
Emerge Inc. founded LorainCounty.com and provides technical support for the site. From a purely legal and financial perspective, Emerge Inc. is majority owner of the business LorainCounty.com LLC.
The more detailed answer:
Mike and I registered LorainCounty.com on July 2, 1996; 3-months before we formally started Emerge Inc. At the time, we thought it was a good domain name, but had no idea how we would use it.
After starting Emerge, we decided to use LorainCounty.com to demonstrate the work that Emerge could do and promote the benefits of the Internet. We had a local search engine to link people to local websites and cyber news to talk about exciting things happening on the Internet. (Internet Archive)
In 2000, Emerge spun-off LorainCounty.com as a separate legal entity LorainCounty.com LLC. We raised a small amount of investment money and redesigned LorainCounty.com. Since that time, the site has been almost exclusively a user generated website with just about everything you see on LorainCounty.com being provided by users.
To this day, we prefer to say that Emerge founded LorainCounty.com. We avoid ownership words because of our strong belief that the user’s of the site ‘own’ the site. Without their contributions, the site would just be graphics and interesting computer code.
We also say that Emerge provides technical support for LorainCounty.com. Rarely is there a day that we don’t tinker with the site and make small improvements here and there. New features are added on a fairly regular basis and almost always based on suggestions for users. Why build something that no one is asking for?
