Reprinted from the Washington Times, February, 1999:

Williamsburg woman buys 667 sites to develop domains on the

WILLIAMSBURG — Ask Gilinda Rogers why she has amassed 667 World Wide Web addresses - and counting - and she gives any number of reasons:

* She bought CoxCable.com and CoxCommunications.com hoping to save her tiny cable news show.

* She bought Eve.com and Gwen.com to teach her young daughters a thing or two about the Internet.

* She bought TheSuperstation.com{D-} to meet Ted Turner.

As she goes grocery shopping, shuttles Eve and Gwen to school and visits with friends, Mrs. Rogers keeps a pen and pad handy: A new "domain name," or Internet address, might pop into her head.

"I'll see something, and I'll say, `Hey, that's a really good idea.' And I'll write a little note to myself."

When she gets some free time - usually early in the morning or late at night - she logs onto her living room computer and goes to her favorite site: the Internet Network Information Center, or InterNIC, the official domain name registration center.

If the names are available, Mrs. Rogers buys them - at $70 a pop.

It's a 60-hour-a-week job that she hopes will pay off as her company, U-Surf.com, develops the names into Web sites and sells advertising on them. She believes the 300 or so "best of" and "best in" sites - such as "bestofNYC.com," "bestofAtlanta.com" and "bestof-Richmond.com" - have the most promise. Judging by her meeting last month with some venture capitalists in Denver, she may be right.

"My husband used to say I should get a real job," she says. "He doesn' t think that anymore."

She's been through numerous negotiations in the past year. Some have been amicable, as with a California beauty supply company that paid a pretty penny for Eve.com. Others have been heated, as with Cox Communications, which brought five officials from Atlanta to her Williamsburg house last summer. Cox and Mrs. Rogers are still negotiating the use of the names. But after Cox threatened last month to take her to court, Mrs. Rogers says she probably will sell the names to Cox for $220 - the price she paid for buying and developing them.

Mrs. Rogers, 39, is a longtime entrepreneur. Her father, former Williamsburg mayor and current City Council member Gil Granger, owned two radio stations. She has been the queen of some off-beat jobs. In 1981, at 21, she bought land on Pocahontas Trail and built the Wiener-In restaurant. She sold it soon after, bought a Williamsburg camera store and sold it. Then, in 1988, she became a souvenir seller soon to be promoted to general manager for her father's minor league baseball team.

Some people accused her of running the team into the ground, and she concedes she didn't know the first thing about baseball. After some news stories criticized her management, she learned, in a statement from her father, that she had "resigned."

Later she became a saleswoman at her father's radio station, WMBG. In 1994 - upset with how the local press covered a Williamsburg child molestation - she founded her own TV show, "First News." Then she bought one of her father's stations, WPTG.

Mrs. Rogers says she "didn't know anything about the Internet" until two years ago. She had an account with America Online, but that was about it.

While flipping through the newspaper, she came across an ad for "wmbg.com, " a Web site devoted to Williamsburg and wondered whether the site' s owner was trying to cash in on the radio station's name. He told her she could have it for $70,000. She was mad at first, but then realized, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Still, her goal, she says, has never been to sell the names, but to "help companies with their marketing."

In March 1997, she bought her first domain name, "localnews.org,"{D- } and by last fall had more than 200 names. She has hired five Web developers and developed 74 of the names into Web sites.

She taps into the large pool of people who mistakenly wander into her sites looking for something else. "TheThrillPark.com," for example, attracts lots of ads from Kentucky companies making their pitch to the 2,000 visitors trying to reach "ThrillPark.com," the official site of a Kentucky amusement park.

Similarly, she expects "TheSuperstation.com" to capitalize on people looking for "superstation.com," Turner Broadcasting System's site. She insists that her initial motive was simply to trade the name for a chance to meet Ted Turner.

Last fall, in what may have been her smartest move, she bought about 300 "bestof" city and state sites, where she hosts on-line contests about the best pizza joints and jazz bars in town. She has begun developing those sites.

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