Reprinted from Daily Press, Thursday, April 8, 1999:
By Susan Friend
Daily Press
WILLIAMSBURG, Virginia — THEY GOT THERE FIRST. Hugh Burns and his wife, Nadia, make and sell beer under the Williamsburg Brewing Co. label. Recently, they were talking about developing a Web page but hadn't gotten around to registering the domain name on the Net. Around the same time, they read a DP story by Peter Dujardin about a Williamsburg woman - Gilinda Rogers - who has amassed 667 Web addresses. Then Burns and his wife went to the Taste of Williamsburg, where they had an exhibit site and passed out beer samples. During the event, Rogers - whom they both knew - walked up to their exhibit, picked up one of their pamphlets and said something like, "You could use a domain name." Burns says a light bulb went off in his wife's head, and she recalled reading the story about Rogers. "That's the woman I was telling you about," she told her husband. "There's the Web guy. Tell him," Burns replied, pointing to a friend with whom they had discussed the Web page. At 10:30 that night, they registered the site - Williamsburgbrewing.com. A day or so later, they realized that Rogers had registered a similar name, Williamsburgbrewery.com. "We moved quickly and we beat her to the punch," Burns said this week.
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