Senior Dennis Boothe and junior Hardy Simes are big men on campus. Odds are that you didn't know that.
As this year's Daily Jolt webmasters, Boothe and Simes have a job that impacts many a Hopkins student, though face-to-face contact with their classmates is completely unnecessary. "It's a cool feeling," Boothe said, "having an influence on the campus and remaining anonymous at the same time."
So if you thought that the Daily Jolt, a student-oriented web site containing innumerable campus and local resources, a daily dose of news and humor and an infamous forum, was just magically updated overnight, you know now that you were mistaken. "It's a very human process," Simes said.
In fact, the Hopkins webmasters (or "Jolt Gods" as Jim Abraham, a third member of the Jolt team, abroad in Spain for the semester, likes to say) invest three to four hours a day into maintaining and updating the site from their own computers. "It's doing a bunch of small stuff," Simes said.
This small stuff includes staying in touch with Sodexho in order to post daily dining hall menus, changing the weekly poll and daily professor quote and scouring the Internet to find pertinent or humorous stories and articles worthy of the site's center news box. "We try to get a balance," Boothe said. "The first two [links] are information or just useful. The third is usually random."
Each day Boothe and Simes also keep busy listing upcoming events happening on and off campus and paying careful attention to the site's forum. "We try not to interfere with what's been said," Boothe said, "but there are usually one or two posts a day that we have to take a good look at."
The Jolt team also notes that there are more offensive or questionable posts during noted midterms or finals when students are undoubtedly experiencing more stress and pressure.
While Boothe and Simes are paid from Jolt HQ at the end of each semester for their work, it's not the cash that keeps them going. "You don't do it for the money," Boothe said. "For the amount of time you're putting into it, you've got to just love it. It doesn't really feel like a job."
And of course there are other perks to being a "Jolt God." The pair receives free invites to concerts and other events that will be highlighted on or reviewed by the site. "We'll probably cover the Reel Big Fish concert," Simes said.
This year the Jolt team has put their energy into improving the picture page format and creating a food guide that is easier to read. Boothe would also like to strengthen the local network of Jolt schools. "They just started a Daily Jolt at Loyola," he said. "That will hopefully initiate more interaction between schools."
Our Daily Jolt site is one of over 100 nationwide that originate from something called Project Jolt. The Daily Jolt is based on a web site called Amherst Central that originally existed on the server at Amherst College in Massachusetts. The project was conceived by Amit Gupta, a student at Amherst during the summer of 1998, and evolved into the Daily Jolt in the spring of 1999 with the help of another Amherst student Noah Winer. Jolt fever quickly spread to schools across the country as students told their friends at other schools about the Web site.
According to Boothe, who has been involved with the Daily Jolt since his freshman year, Hopkins was one of the first three schools to create, maintain and embrace the site. Rikeen Popat and Akash Anand, 2001 Hopkins graduates, got the site up and running here and upon their departure from the University, Boothe and Eli Soloman took over the reigns. Last spring Simes and Abraham joined the team.
The Daily Jolt was created as a response to students' dissatisfaction with the Web sites of their schools and campus groups and their disappointment, as asserted on the site itself, "with lame attempts on the part of companies to create sites for college students." The site also stands out among others as one that gives students freedom to post and display whatever they want.
"We have free reign," Simes said. "We're not funded by StuCo.
"We're not affiliated with Johns Hopkins University at all," Boothe continued, "No one in the administration can dictate to us what goes on there."
The various college-specific versions of the Daily Jolt receive funding from advertisements that is handled by the founder's company, Jolt HQ. The company located in Cambridge, MA pools money generated by ads and divides it based on the hits received by each school's sites. Hopkins, with 50, 000 to 70,000 hits per day is in the top five among Jolt schools. Approximately 1,600 users visit the site each day.
The Jolt team thinks that the success of the site here is probably related to the overall personality of the school. According to Boothe, though the Daily Jolt thrives at Hopkins and is now popular at many other schools across the country, it has been less successful at some larger schools. "It has a lot to do with the culture," he notes, "the type of students."
But regardless of what goes on at other schools, if you're the type of student that uses the Jolt, you have Boothe and Simes to thank for the resource.
Whether or not you'd recognize these guys if you saw them, know that next time you laugh at a professor quote, check to see what time the language lab is open, find a summer sublet without putting up one poster or rant about whatever you'd like the forum, that they're the ones responsible for keeping the Jolt alive.
"The biggest thing is to provide a forum, especially if there's a big issue like Club Night," Boothe said. "The Jolt's there to voice whatever's on our minds."
The Jolt team urges students to keep their eyes open for upcoming contests, like the one that took place last Halloween, and welcomes and encourages comments from fellow students. Suggestions, special request and general shout outs can be sent to jhu@dailyjolt.com.
