Was it just September when I delved into the four jump-crazy Richmonders behind the website Jump Because for Buttermilk & Molasses? Well, the Jump Becausers are now a hit in the pages of the Times-Dispatch, which spotlighted their website yesterday:
They didn't set out to create an online hit that would sweep the globe in less than a year.
They just wanted to get away from the stress of life and have a little fun for a day.
A year ago February, friends Sarah Branigan, Lily Christon, Erin Johnson and Paula Ogston left Richmond for the relative calm of Virginia Beach.
What they did - and the pictures that proved it - went from goofy fun to random hit to an Internet phenomenon called http://www.jumpbecause.com.
It was nothing extraordinary or planned. They just took pictures of themselves jumping. There was no fancy equipment - just four friends snapping pictures of one another with their feet off the ground.
"We were just kind of goofing around, and we started taking pictures," said Ogston, like Christon, a graduate student in psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. "We thought it was funny, so we kept doing it. It was a really fun day for us. We were all stressed out."
Branigan, the administrative director of art education at VCU, later posted some of the pictures on Flickr, a photo-sharing Web site.
Someone at National Public Radio saw one of the pictures - an extraordinary coincidence, considering Flickr estimates users upload more than 5,000 photos per minute - and interviewed Branigan for a story that aired in early May.
The fun of their little taste of celebrity led the friends to create a Web site to post more of their jump pictures and to tell the stories behind the shots.
