PORTLAND ON THE WEB The kind Streets BY JAY BASINER

About a year ago, computer fanatic/entrepreneurs Chris McMann and Walter Dubay set out to do something that no one else was doing. Just around the time when dial-up Internet access was becoming yesterday’s ham sandwich, the two went public with streetsofportland.com, a high-speed-friendly array of all things Portland.

The purpose of the site? This question remains mostly unanswered, but here’s a list of some of the eclectic material you will find on streetsofportland.com:

• 24-hour Beatles, Alice Cooper, seasonal, local, and pop-music radio

• Live video from several spots in Portland, and one can zoom in up to 400 times

• Menus from some Portland restaurants

• Poetry from Portland poets

• Band interviews

• Cooking shows

• Full-length movies like Lobsteroids, an underground Portland cult classic

• Concert slide shows

"Wherever there’s an interest, I will put it on," says McMann, who also owns I/O Computer Services Inc., a computer service/repair/Web design company in Monument Square.

"We both live and breathe computers and we both love music, as you can see," says McMann, clicking as he speaks through pages and pages of high-speed music media. "It’s a lot of work for just two people." His small, seven-by-seven cubical is like an oasis of normalcy in the midst of an office space littered with countless computers and monitors and a galaxy worth of flickering green and yellow lights.

Streetsofportland.com is and remains a work in progress, and McMann speaks with excitement when he refers to the latest and possibly greatest new addition to the site called the SOP (Streets of Portland) Basement Concerts.

Through a tunnel of computers and down a flight of stairs is another oasis: a real and honest concert venue, with a 16-by-eight stage, track lighting, a mixing board, state-of-the-art digital video cameras including a drum-cam dangling from the ceiling — all with a brick-and-mortar backdrop that dates back to the early 19th Century.

"It’s not completely renovated yet, but it’s enough to start doing shows," says McMann, who admits he had no plans to ever do anything like this, but, like everything else on streetsofportland.com, he had an idea and it became a reality.

So, what are the SOP Basement Concerts?

According to McMann, they are a series of concerts performed by local artists that are filmed and streamed around the world, "giving bands in and around New England the chance to be seen all over the world."

What McMann is embarking on is a chance for Portland musicians, spoken-word artists, and poets alike to showcase their art in real time, on a world-wide scale to anybody with a high-speed Internet access.

"Everybody can win here; us, the bands, the community . . . Who knows? Maybe a band could get a record contract out of it," says McMann, as excited with what the project can do for the local music scene than for what it can do for his own business.

So far two bands (the Outsiders, Jessica Rose and the Dark Troubadours) have participated in the SOP Basement Concerts. Eggbot and the Pontiffs are currently on deck for their chance at a global audience and McMann is enthusiastic about aggressively booking more of Portland’s finest acts to participate in something that "no one else is doing."

Also involved with the SOP Basement Concerts is entrepreneur and legendary local music promoter Jim Peterson, who will be working with McMann to, as Peterson puts it, "revolutionize the film and entertainment industry."

"If this thing gets advertised correctly, these basement concerts will do for the Internet what MTV did for television," says Peterson. "This is completely unlimited exposure."