The CAMFaq
- Why a RobCAM?
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I say, why not a RobCAM? I mean, I am the center of the universe, after all. That's right, dammit, the world is Rob-centric. Besides, why should that bitch Jenni get all the press? I'm twice as good looking as she is. Have you seen my smooth, milky thighs lately? And don't overlook these perky breasts!
- Where is the RobCAM located?
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Currently, there is only one RobCAM, located on top of the monitor in my cubicle at work. It catches me in the most compromising positions -- changing for a hot date, being "intimate" with my girlfriend, debugging JavaScript, arguing with my coworkers -- so you should check in early and often.
- Aren't you concerned about losing your privacy like this?
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I don't consider this an invasion of privacy, I consider it "performance art". I'm just showing the world the uncensored, everyday life of the common web developer. There's no varnish. And, despite what you may be thinking, I'm not a professional model (so, please, don't hate me because I'm beautiful). Everything is totally unrehearsed and unscripted. You never know what you'll find at the RobCAM.
- Don't you consider some of this pornography?
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It depends entirely on your definition of pornography, but, yes. IEG has already begun distributing my video, available in finer stroke stores across the nation.
- Where did you get the idea to do this?
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From the most corrupting force on the web today: Salon!
- Do you really think your life is so interesting to people that it's worth posting everything, even your most intimate and compromising moments, on a public web site for all the world to see?
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Hey, 100 million sheep-- er, uh, Rob fans per week can't be wrong! Can I help it if I have something everyone wants to see?
- Dude, are you for real?
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I'm for real, yeah, but the cam, if you haven't figured it out by now, is not. It's a simple javascript program that randomly loads one of 21 pictures every time you refresh the page. I could've gone an extra mile to make it even more convincing, but this is just made in jest. Consider it a statement.
The webcam concept fascinates me. I have no desire to start my own, nor do I make regular check-ins to the webcams currently in operation. In fact, I checked the JenniCAM for the first time in two years simply because I saw it mentioned in an article printed in Salon.
I checked out the JenniCAM for the first time a couple of years ago when she was still shooting it from her college dorm. I checked out the site, which I recall was fairly spartan at the time, and was impressed by the technology that allowed her to do it, but thought it was rather presumptious of her to think anyone would care long enough to keep coming back. Silly me, I forgot about the all-powerful male sex drive.
Jenni was the first person to submit her life to the millions of voyeurs that constantly lurk the Internet. We're talking about a population that, while becoming more egalitarian each day, consists primarily of pre- and mid-pubescent boys and men who, frankly, need to get out from behind the monitor more often (if you think I'm being judgemental, recall that I, too, fall squarely in this category). The result was a media frenzy, stirred by the need to explore the new online culture as it quickly spreads around us.
I won't deny it: Jenni had a fascinating idea that was certainly worth exploring. It didn't hurt that she was a young, attractive female either. She used the ethernet connection located in her dorm room to update the shots taken by her camera and automated it using some relatively basic UNIX stuff. I can probably think of a million things I'd like to have updated regularly on the Internet so I could check up on things from the convenience of my cubicle at work, and Jenni was among the first to cut through the technical hassles that kept many from doing such a thing.
But it isn't the fact that she put her private life into the public realm that fascinates me. It's the unimaginable number of people who flocked to her site to see what she had done -- and to, perhaps, catch a glimpse of the young woman in an intimate moment. And, really, it's not the folks who came by once to check it out, like myself; it's the thousands, perhaps millions, who return consistently to check in on her. Jenni has become one of the Internet's first honest-to-God celebrities, with a strong fan base and everything.
Were I in her shoes, I'd probably set up the project to run for about two months. Had I received the response she did, I would probably have kept it going for another six months or so. But, at some point, the amount of traffic her site generated was so great it was affecting her university's servers. The administrators asked her to remove her site from the system. This would have been enough for me to say "time to end this project" and post an archive of the best moments plus some kind of mini-dissertation about what I gained from the experience. When I first visited her site, I assumed that was just what she had in mind. Smart woman, I though.
Flash forward to 1999. IT'S STILL THERE. She's out of the dorms and living in an apartment in Washington DC. The ethernet connection is no longer freely available. She now has an ISDN line running into her apartment connected to two computers -- both outfitted with cameras -- that are themselves connected by a network hub. Her site is run off an ISP (something tells me Best.com, but that's totally unconfirmed so don't quote me) where a cron command ftps over the ISDN to her computer at home every two minutes to get the latest image. This sounds like a big time and effort investment, even for a professional web developer.
She continues to get millions of hits -- per week, according to one source -- from folks checking in on her, captivated by her life. They send her gifts, e-mails, marriage proposals -- all the flourishes received by Hollywood celebrities and well-publicized prison-inmates. The camera updates every 20 minutes for non-members, but those willing to pay $15 per year can get their updates in a quick and easy two minutes.
So, let's examine this for a moment: One could say she's doing it for the money, and, considering she charges a meager $15 per year, it's entirely possible that she's making a bundle just off of volume. But the system can't possibly be cheap. She has two computers. At about $1500 each (an extremely conservative figure for a full system, including cameras) that's $3000. If she's going through Best.com, the startup is $50 and she's paying at least $25 per month (through probably more if she's also going through them for her ISDN and if her bandwidth is as high as she says) which ends up being $300 per year, plus an extra $35 per year for domain registration.
The ISDN line is, in my eyes, the biggest chunk of technology in use here. Through PacBell (I know she's in DC, but I'm a left-coaster -- roll with me on this one) ISDN installation for the home costs $125. Per-month charges are $29.95 plus usage, which is some fee charged by the minute. You also get 200 free minutes on weekday evenings and weekends. So her per-month charges add up to a minimum of $359.40 per year. With usage, however, it goes up. The PacBell page is vague about how much "usage" is. Since it's so popular now, let's say it's a dime a minute. Since the ISP ftps to Jenni's home through the ISDN every two minutes, and assuming it takes about a minute to complete the transaction, at least 720 minutes per day are used just to update her picture on her site. That's $7.20 a day, or about $216 a month. Minus her 200 free minutes, that's $214 per month, for a total of $2,568 per year.
So far we've racked up a total set up fee of $3175. Per year, this venture is costing her $3262.40, or about $271.87 per month. To cover her one-time costs, she needs at least 212 paying members. To maintain it per year she needs at least 218 paying members. To break even in her first year, after buying all the equipment and eveything, she needed a total of 430 paying members.
Considering the popularity of her site, I'm sure getting these members is not a problem. My calculations don't take extra costs like repairs, equipment replacement, upgrades, special webcam software, etc. into consideration, so even after all that she's not making a profit. Plus, because this is all income, she needs to pay taxes and probably needs some kind of a business license to operate a pay site in Washington DC.
My point here (and, yes, I do have one) is that this is not a big money-making venture. Any profit she does see is probably a nice addition to her income, much the same as freelance writing is a nice addition to mine. But is it worth the headache of maintaining all of this equipment AND putting her life and the lives of those who share hers out to the public?
When I rediscovered the site, I was surprised by how glossy it looked. Impressive, really. I read somewhere that she's a web designer (I know she works from home and, in all fairness, my cost analysis above did not take into consideration that much of her expenses could also be written off through her legitimate job, so she may be seeing more profit than I'm estimating, but not by much). For a site as popular as hers, it should be slick. But what really got me was how incredibly self-centered all of it was. Yes, Jenni is a minor celebrity. Yes, she should probably have a fan site. But I have never, and I mean NEVER, seen a fan site that was so incredibly focused on the celebrity being fawned over that was no written by a fan. This is Jenni's site. She created it herself. Everything that appears there must first be approved by her, particularly since she maintains it herself. Therefore, we can't blame the content on some obsessive Jenni-nut. Or can we?
The first thing that popped into my mind when I read her FAQ talking about her many marriage proposals and read her poetry and all that was, "Does this woman REALLY need all this just to satisfy her ego?" I'm sure Jenni's a lovely young woman, and I'm probably being a bastard for nitpicking her like this, but I have to wonder what posessed her to create such an elaborate altar to herself.
And before you start reaming on me for being such a hypocrite (remember, you're reading this on Rob's altar to HIMself) keep in mind that what you're seeing here took me all of a week to put together, including loooong breaks. We're talking about 80 hours of manpower total. Since it's currently being hosted in Tripod, and seeing as I coded it all by hand, it costs me nothing to keep me running. Zip, zero, zilch. Also keep in mind that, while you certainly are seeing my narcissistic side, my focus is less on how wonderful/cute/intelligent I am, but more on what I find interesting. Personal web sites can be found everywhere, and most do take part in a certain degree of self aggrandizement and ego-stroking, but not to the level of the JenniCAM site.
Jenni has posted her journal, which I can only describe as the ramblings of any average 20-something self-absorbed female, so her fans can keep up with what's happening between her and Geof and find out how she did her hair for New Year's Eve. Her photo shoot (it's a webcam site, do we REALLY need a separate photo gallery?) is a series of shots that appear as though they were meant for a model's portfolio. Her JenniGallery, an archive of selected shots taken from the camers during the time it's been active, has her in various poses and states of dress and undress. The very first page has a shot of her on top of her boyfriend, and they're not playing horsey. Dig through them and you'll see some shots where she's working in front of the computer topless, and one where she seems to be showing off her legs for the camera. She says in her FAQ that she no longer acknowledges that the camera is there, but I find it hard to believe that the average image-conscious young woman, knowing a camera is trained on her at all times, would choose randomly to sit topless at her computer, whether she's immune to the effects of the camera or not. I'd think there'd be something in the back of her head saying, "Um, Jenni, you're naked in front of millions of people. Put something on."
The high point of the site is the "JustJenni" area. I don't know which I love more -- the title (Just Jenni? What else is there on this site OTHER than just Jenni?) or the fact that it's even more self-centered than the JenniCAM itself. If only Jenny McCarthy or some other bubble-brained Hollywood bombshell were as giving to their fans.
The JenniCAM site started out as a fascinating project, copied hundreds of times over by other adventurous/attention-starved individuals. As an aside to an otherwise varied site (i.e. UC Berkeley's Sproul cam -- just as difficult and costly to maintain, but simply an added bonus to visiting the UC Berkeley homepage) a personal webcam is a pretty neat experiment, not only in the way the Internet culture will react to it, but also in how it affects one's psyche. But to build an entire site around such a concept as an offering to one's ego... well, I obviously think Jenni went way overboard. Like I said before, I'm sure Jenni's a really nice young woman, the sort of person I'd enjoy sipping coffee with and would probably even considering asking for a date (assuming she were more geographically desirable than she is).
But her site seems to scream, "PAY ATTENTION TO ME!" in a way that a boiling bunny just doesn't seem to convey. I don't know Jenni, I don't know anyone who does, but I'm beginning to wonder whether she was always as self-centered as her site indicates or whether web fame took a nice young woman interested in putting her computer skills to use in a quirky experiment and turned her into an egomaniac. Again, I can't see any self-conscious 20-something woman showing even half the things she has to just her close friends, much less an audience of perceived millions. Jenni is a very attractive young woman, but in a society where there are strict rules of what and what is not beautiful (and, not to be cruel, but Jenni is no Cindi Crawford), I can't really see how she could muster up the self-confidence to sit topless in front of a camera or expose her dreams and daily thoughts to the criticism, voiced or otherwise, of a huge group of strangers. Perhaps she's just more emotionally-balanced than most people I know (including myself). If so, all power to her. But there's something desperate about all of this, something that seems to be making up for a perceived inadequacy.
Again: the webcam is a cool use of technology, but who in this world is so damned important that their every intimate moment must be broadcast for the world to see? Other than me, that is.