What are we?The entity known as tmbg.org is, as noted above, entirely fan-run. We have grown from just a mailing list to a web site with almost too much information. :-) You can see from the counter on the home page how many times the site has been accessed. It's accurate, counting every hit since the first day the site was put up. If you would like better statistics there is a full report available. Why are we?Nobody can really say what makes us willing to do all this stuff, but our history is a simple story. Some time back before anyone can remember Micah Anderson started a They Might Be Giants mailing list out of super.org. At some point back in late 1992 or early 1993 it moved to the GNU mailing list site. Some time in 1994 there started to be problems with the GNU site, and Micah slowly became too busy to deal with the list. At some point in early 1995 the software broke completely and there was no mailing list for a while. Then for a few weeks Jonathan manually collected and resent mail to former members of Micah's old mailing list. It was at this point that Leo decided to pick up the domain name tmbg.org and give the mailing list a perminant home. Jonathan sent out mail to those on the old list telling them to switch to this new version. The first message went out on August 31, 1995. It has been running ever since. Since the domain tmbg.org was already set up it seemed a logical extension to have a web site as well. Bo Orloff worked for the Giants and had a small page, so Leo contacted him. He was all for a more "offical" web site. Leo started to design www.tmbg.org, and appealed to the mailing list for help. Jonathan answered that call and managed to get together a lot of interpretations, lyrics, and chords in a very short order and get them up. Within several weeks of starting the site it was a full-fledged web site. Meanwhile, other things were happening. Bo talked to the Giants about having an offical home page on the Internet, and they liked the idea. The name tmbg.com was obtained for this offical site. Bo started working on it for the Giants. Unfortunately Bo was unable to complete the site, and the Giants turned to Henry Bar-Levav to do the site. From There the offical site grew, now having many people involved in it's creation. Look at www.tmbg.com for more information. Somewhere along the line ftp.tmbg.org came to live as a central repository for MIDI and .WAV files and the like. The FTP site suffers from being disorganized and full of all sorts of old cruft. One of these days it will be sorted out and turned into something cool. Just recently, monopuff.org became registered by us as well. Look for additions there as well as we expand to cover the exploits of John Flansburgh in his side project. Alex Gershon is driving the show over there. We hope you enjoy this site-- it's a labor of love for all involved. What does the future hold?We don't know. Those of us working on the site work in our spare time. Some weeks large changes are made, and during others nothing happens. We all want to see the site grow and prosper. We have a lot of information about They Might Be Giants that we want to be able to provide to you, the fan. You can help. Fan submissions drive the site, we can only put up the information we have. This is not only true for interpretations and the like, but also for the graphics and other multimedia on the site. If you have an idea, please try us, we are always open to something new. |