PowerTowneDistro.com

PowerTowneDistro.com started as an experiment in online communications in the fall of 2005. The brain child of Dwane St.Marie and Brian Hervieux was the Speak Up Forum that big-banged in late January 2006 and opened for its first public unveiling the first week of February 2006. The server it ran on was created as, PowerTowneDistro.com owned and operated in the living room of St.Marie where it remains to this day.

Shortly after its inception, Speak Up added Moderators and began to take shape into a local free speech safe haven in an otherwise oppressive, politically correct online culture dominated by one local website that did not tolerate any manner of thoughful, albeit contrary, opinion. The vocal in the movement had spent years online getting hammered by a gaggle of sycophants from the tyrannical site every time they even mentioned responsibility, accountability and freedom on a forum. With the addition of citizen activist and public service volunteer Lew Metaxas as moderator the forum quickly took hold and planted its roots firmly in local online presence. Today Metaxas is fully vested in Speak Up as the third administrator with St.Marie and Hervieux that have formed what is locally nicknamed the Powerboys.

You can reach the Speak Up Forum here.

As Speak Up grew so did PowerTowneDistro.com. Since then the site has gone through many changes as it adapts to the whims of its users. We at one time ran an online news outlet on these very pages. Covering local elections and current events. We where faster than the print press and often beat them to publishing due to being online and bored. We could leave a council meeting and have audio and a story online within an hour. The recorder would be running their story tomorrow. Oh they will claim we where amateurs and didn’t have any place in journalism, yet they quickly launched recorder.com and opened the news up to comment by readers. And Arn Albertini the then greenfield recorder beat writer for Greenfield Ma. would push me out of the way to beat me to an interview prospect. I just had to laugh as he laid shoe prints on my feet. I could so take him. He had no idea how close he was.

After getting bored with that and realizing that we greatly improved the local news scene for the readers we moved on to more exciting projects. We realized that this server can be used for whatever we could dream up. And dream away we did. With personality and brass we forged our way through the haters. Brought down some pretty ugly scenes. Took on the crusader role and went after the guilty. We made a few enemies along the way, mostly ultra-radicals and complete wackjobs. We have haters and lovers. We try to be as truthful and honest as we can. Try to cut through the spin.

So here we are again, wanting to share our thoughts and experiences with the world. The boys said lets go back to publishing stuff. Not full time, but you know when the moon inspires us. Not necessarily news but what ever we want when ever we want to. So I set off to cyber-space in search of answers and this is what I came up with. Something new and innovative. A Blog thats not a blog. A web site where we can publish our writings and also continue the Speak Up Forum and continue to run other hosted projects as well as our evolving online marketplace.

We hope you enjoy our little slice of the network and come back often.

Dwane St.Marie