Virtual Hebrides

The Virtual Hebrides was founded by photographer Sam Maynard, who had set up Ẹlas Media - a TV production company largely working through the medium of the Gaelic language, and Scott Hatton who in the early days of the World Wide Web had been running one of the first internet-based communities. As the first major website in the Scottish islands and based in a community where nearly everybody knows everybody else, its influence stretched far beyond that of most other websites.

The Hebrides are agrarian economies, with small, close-knit, widely-distributed populations and largely based on crofting, fishing and tourism. Like many marginal communities, they face the problem of depopulation of the traditional communities with young, skilled islanders moving away, matched with incomers looking for a "get away from at all" life. This can cause clashes of interest and culture.

The Virtual Hebrides took these issues head-on with its twin mottos of "live local, work global" and "we are all islanders on the net". It was many things to many people: a Hebrides encyclopedia of articles, a virtual community, a local history project, a promoter of Scottish Gaelic on the internet, a genealogy forum and a campaigning platform for rural equality, amongst other aims.

At one point in 1995 it became the largest rural website in the world as measured by visitors to its many pages.

Based in such a small economy, the Virtual Hebrides was perhaps doomed to failure. Money was poured in from its parent company Ẹlas Media. Scott Hatton left in 1998 and was replaced by Alex Tearse. Eventually, the website helped bring its parent company to bankruptcy and by 2000, both the Virtual Hebrides and Ẹlas Media were no more.

While its influence can be wildly overstated, especially in the southern Outer Hebrides, (it was based in Stornoway, Lewis), it was at least partly responsible for opening up the Hebrides to new ways of working. Some Hebrideans began to look to new media for their living. It was realised that, in the world of the internet, geographical location was suddenly less important. Subsequently, an initiative in North Lochs championed teleworking, a call centre became of one Stornoway's largest employers and a campaign for [connected communities] started in the islands.

Incidentally, whilst by no means the first use of the word ('virtual reality' had been around since 1989), the prefix "Virtual" became endemic on the world wide web for a while in the mid 1990s, thanks to the Virtual Hebrides.