The Daily Jolt

» see dailyjolt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the daily jolt's ten years line up almost exactly with my university years, on a continent i was not on. amit gupta and noah winer started it at amherst college in 2000 with seth fitzsimmons, and mike goelzer put up the brown university version shortly after. by its peak it was more than a hundred separate sites, one per school, across the united states and canada.

the model is the part worth recording. this was not one national student website with school sections. each campus got its own domain and its own front page, edited by students at that school who were not paid, and the company in boston kept the code running underneath. the local site knew the local weather, the local movie theater and the name of the professor everybody had opinions about. that specificity is what the national products could never buy.

turkish universities in the same decade had nothing per-campus that looked like this. what we had instead was national forums that everybody read regardless of where they studied, donanimhaber for hardware and frmtr for everything else, plus whatever mailing list a department happened to run. the unit of community was the interest, not the address. the daily jolt made the opposite bet and it worked until the address stopped being scarce.

~ the record ~

~ what was actually on the page ~

an archived campus front page from the johnson and wales site is a good specimen. across the top: forum, jobs, marketplace, a food guide with six hundred reviews, getting around, concerts, tv listings, movies. a second row for a book exchange and a ride board. down the left, the weather for tomorrow above a list of campus resources. down the right, a quick poll, which on that day was a vote between two professors.

in the middle, in large underlined blue type, the actual content: come chat, submit a poll. the interface was doing no work at all to seem designed. it was a directory of the four or five things a student needed that week, wrapped around a forum. the whole page loaded in under five kilobytes.

~ the jolters ~

each site had an editor or two who ran it for nothing, and the company called them jolters. that arrangement is why the network scaled to a hundred campuses on a small boston payroll, and it is also why the sites varied so much in quality. a school with an energetic jolter had a living front page. a school without one had last month's poll still on it.

it created the usual problems for a business built on other people's unpaid attention. a student editor answers to nobody, and at least one campus student government threatened to pull its backing over what got posted. the company owned the platform and the volunteers owned the tone, and there was never a clean way to reconcile those two facts.

~ the handoff ~

thefacebook launched at harvard in february 2004 and spread school by school through exactly the same map the daily jolt had drawn. it did the one thing the jolt never did, which was to attach a real name to every post. the anonymous campus forum went from being the reason to visit to being the reason not to.

the network limped for six more years while its parent company bought collegiatelink and turned into an administrative software business, eventually passing through chungdahm learning and then campus labs on its way to higher one. the consumer site was the part nobody wanted. on 6 april 2010 at five in the afternoon the daily jolt posted its own obituary and thanked its people by name. it sent everybody to campuslive, another site out of the amherst area. captures of dailyjolt.com show a working page on 2 april and a redirect by early may.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »