Somewhere in Omaha an attorney chats with a punk rocker. A high school junior vents teen angst. Generation Xers reminisce about movies from the '80s and reflect on today's popular music.

SLAM Omaha, a local organization and Web site standing for Support Local Art/Music, is not just a place, a destination on a computer screen. It's a hybrid of an online community and the pre-existing, real-life local music "scene" of musicians, fans, artists, disc jockeys and others in the music industry who frequent Omaha's live music venues.

SLAM held its first benefit concert, packing the Ranch Bowl with 500 people who helped raise $1,500 and collect six boxes of clothes for the Youth Emergency Services Youth Street Outreach.

Because of SLAM, that scene has seeped beyond the walls of the Ranch Bowl, the Music Box or the Cog Factory. It shows up at work, when people want to surprise their friends with happy-birthday posts. At home, when they can't sleep. In cars, when a radio show features SLAM concert picks. On cars, when another black, red and white SLAM logo is slapped on a bumper.

SLAM's mix of concert and art-show listings, message boards, chat rooms and other features has proved wildly successful, garnering more than 850,000 page views a month and creating its own lingo, celebrities, cliques and even a following by people outside the scene.

While SLAM taps the same human desire to connect that has propelled other Web sites, it also provides a service to a community of people devoted to self-expression - artists, musicians and their fans - but who didn't have a central place for dialogue.

"It keeps the music scene going in this city," said Matt Markel, concert promoter and Ranch Bowl owner.

SLAM organizers (from left), Mick Messina, Melissa Infield and Mike "Bubba" Suiter.

And for people who are more viewers than participants in local music, it's a sort of real TV broadcasting this sometimes surreal world, with a cast of intriguing characters, many with multiple screen-name aliases.

"It's kind of like a soap opera," says Shannon McAnulty. "Everybody's online all the time."

These are the days of their lives - days dominated by computers. At school. At home. At work.

SLAM is similar to what "American Bandstand" and MTV were to earlier generations, providing the latest available forum for a youth-oriented culture based on music, appealing to a generation bred on Apple computers and Atari, Palm Pilots and pagers.

Interactive. Entertaining. Visual. Instant.

But the four Generation Xers who created SLAM weren't trying to capitalize on young people addicted to the instant gratification the Internet can provide.

SLAM started as a logo created by Ryan Doyle, a graphic designer at Ink Images, where he worked with Mick Messina, a screenprinter. The two had talked about having an entity to promote local art and music.

"I got tired of people in Omaha saying there's nothing going on," Messina said. "It became a way to put a stamp on things."

So in the summer of 1997, Messina started putting the SLAM stamp everywhere. He handed out thousands of fliers at live music shows, and he, Doyle and their friend Melissa Infield created "Visual Prozac," a local art show. With more than 30 local artists participating and 150 people attending, the event's success inspired the three to move forward.

When SLAM acquired a presence on the Internet, bands flocked there to list information about themselves and coming shows.

"It was snowballing," Messina said. "I don't think we knew what to do."

Bubba to the rescue.

Doyle and Messina met Mike "Bubba" Suiter, the designer of one band's Web site, at a CD-release party in January 1999. Standing outside the 18th Amendment Saloon as the bar closed at 1 a.m., the three talked for an hour despite the bitter cold.

Suiter, now a software developer at Insession Technologies, started designing a site, and on March 26, 1999, the first version of the independently functioning SLAM Web site went online.

New features such as message boards took off.

"We never thought the message boards would be so popular," Suiter said. "Now roughly 50 percent of our traffic is on the message boards."

In January 1999, SLAM received about 1,500 page views. Two years later, the new independent site was receiving 565,000 page views per month.

SLAM held its first benefit concert, packing the Ranch Bowl with 500 people who helped raise $1,500 and collect six boxes of clothes for the Youth Emergency Services Youth Street Outreach.

Suiter redesigned the site two more times, adding new features and making it more user-friendly. When Doyle got married and started pursuing other goals, Infield officially stepped in, and the new trio had a balanced structure - Infield handling art, Messina overseeing music and Suiter mastering the technology.

They filed papers to form a limited-liability corporation, and the amount of traffic on the site started getting attention from companies looking for ways to advertise to 18- to 34-year-old consumers, SLAM's core audience.

The SLAM partners several months ago started charging for advertising, and the site is now breaking even, they said.

They also bought a digital camera for the "photo album," which has become one of the biggest draws to the site.

Far more people view the message boards than post. For example, a posting entitled "I need dating advice" by a Slammer called seedling 420 was viewed 179 times but received only 15 posts.

That amount of traffic has attracted not only businesses that want to advertise on SLAM but also someone interested in buying the Web site - whom the SLAM partners identified only as "someone with ties to the local music community."

"We backed out pretty quick," Messina said. "We were like, 'This is not where we're headed right now.'"

In the future, they easily could head that way, said Sherry Sivey, Web development instructor at Nebraska Business Development Center, a division of UNO's College of Business Administration, who critiques business Web sites. Sivey said she was not surprised by its success - the site has useful information, multiple interactive features that keep users interested, the technology to run smoothly and a clean appearance with bright, contrasting colors and animated features.

"I thought this site was very good, especially from a marketing standpoint," Sivey said. "They've got a real future, and if they are looking to sell it down the road, they could make some money."

The SLAM partners are not dismissing that possibility, but they say they would rather operate it themselves on their own terms, possibly as their full-time jobs.

For now, they enjoy seeing their original goal realized.

"I think the benefit concerts exemplify everything we want to do," Messina said, explaining that the concerts featuring local bands have raised more than $12,000 for local charities. "We want to promote shows, and we want to do good."