Writing about a Little Bit of Everything
If you have not heard of Admin Jones and Editor Jeff (those are their screen names) you may soon hear more about them. These two intrepid guys set out to create an interesting blog about anything and everything. They almost named it the Whim Blog and Whimsical Thoughts but, they say, they thought those names would not be taken seriously.
So why should Many Topics be taken seriously? Because it is dedicated to sharing the authors’ thoughts about important topics like health, travel, budgeting, and technology.
“Everyday life is filled with many topics,” Jones points out. “We watch television, use cell phones, surf the Internet, drive down to the store, and wear synthetic fabrics. These are ubiquitous things to most of us but some people devoted their entire lives to giving those things to us.”
Editor Jeff looks a little distant as he reminisces about his early years on the Internet. “I used to find Web sites about nothing. They literally said nothing. People didn’t know what to do with these accounts they had. They wanted to be on the Internet so they paid their local ISP for a modem account and the ISP said, ‘here is a Web account’. So people put up pictures of themselves, their cats, their dogs. Sometimes they created blank pages.”
The Web was once a huge blank page and people have spent years painting over it, writing on it, pinning images to it, and in general inventing and reinventing it. These two guys celebrate life on the Web in a way that they hope makes a difference.
In articles like Look Around You: Time Is Wasting and Dreaming About Far Away Lands they try to express themselves in the way they want to see other people share. But this is 2009, not 1999. Why do this project now?
“Because Twitter and Facebook have turned back the clock,” Jones complains. “People are no longer expressing themselves. Now they’re asking for driving directions in real time and telling us they are clipping their nails. They install stupid applications that don’t do anything useful. The Web should be used for much more than that.”
“We want to show people there is still so much left to be said,” Jeff agrees. “We’re not finishing painting on the canvas.”
I asked why they don’t use their real names. “It’s an experimental site,” Jones confesses. “Maybe people who know us would be less supportive if they knew we were trying to change the world.” They both look very serious. I think they mean business.