As lead signer Adam is often also the voice of the band's website. His posts offer an interesting insight as to the meaning behind his songs and the direction of the band.
Before the full website, Adam would post messages on AOL about quick happenings with the band and their work on the latest album Recovering The Satellites. These posts are particularly interesting not just because they are the oldest known posts from the band but also for the name dropping and references to material that has never been released (or would appear 3 albums later on >Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings) These posts are believed to be older than the Emerald.net Newsgroup Posts, but do not have any firm dates associated with them.
In December, 1996, the band launched their own independent website (http://www.countingcrows.com/) which utilized a then popular Newsgroup website called Emerald.Net for their message boards (the name of that news group was countingcrows.misc). Occasionally members of the band's management as well as Adam would post on the message board. The archived posts are the oldest known messages from Adam about the band and their music.
By the end of 1997, it appears that Adam returned to posting on AOL (perhaps because the popularity of the service as compared to web pages at the time).