[1] Software developer James (Jim) Kloss started the live interactive webcast immediately after DSL internet arrived in the small village of Talkeetna, Alaska.

[16] In 2008, the venue was moved to a "renovated log saloon" dubbed The Wheat Palace to accommodate more patrons,[5] and to host other activities.

[16] The site evolved into a vehicle for promoting independent artists, helped by Jim's partner and musician Esther Golton.

[9][19] The site hosted numerous house concerts[19] which were broadcast live,[9] including Marian Call,[20] Rod Picott,[21] Jeffrey Foucault,[22] Amanda Shires,[21] and Danny Schmidt.

[26] A custom install of MediaWiki ran the user-editable music database,[16] the same software that operates Wikipedia, Wiktionary and other Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Listeners (affectionately dubbed Wheatheads)[17] were encouraged to add tags, lyrics, art, ratings and other information to song, album and artist pages.

[27] Wheatheads could call in phonegrams that were played automatically on the stream,[10] or leave a comment in the chat system for an EJ to read on air.

Text based games (and later, rewards for collaborating on articles) would let Wheatheads accrue "wheatberries", an early form of web gamification.