Slashdot Log In
JenniCam Closing After 7+ Years
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Dec 05, 2003 04:32 AM
from the no-longer-refreshing dept.
from the no-longer-refreshing dept.
An anonymous Jenni fan writes "Details are sketchy, but apparently within the past few days, JenniCam has announced that it is closing permanently on New Year's Eve. Jenni Ringley has run the site for over 7 and a half years and was even voted more popular than Linus in a ZDNet poll. Of course, such constant exposure has had its downsides; she has received death threats in the past. Last chance to check out that Slashbox while her life is still online."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
And... (Score:5, Funny)
The end of an era... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The end of an era... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The end of an era... (Score:4, Funny)
Providing the their last words aren't.. 'I told u I was hardcore.'
Parent
Re:The end of an era... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:The end of an era... (Score:5, Funny)
A moment of one-handed typing, though, sure, I'll go for that.
Parent
Re:The end of an era... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:The end of an era... (Score:5, Insightful)
--
Parent
Re: The end of an era... (Score:5, Funny)
> It was amazing to me that people could get so worked up about seeing a fat chick's floppy boobies.
Adjust the aspect ratio, silly.
Parent
Am I the only one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Funny)
I begin to understand the sad forlorn look in their eyes when my parents would wax poetic about something so banal as the A&P grocery stores and I'd indignantly grumble, "who cares?"
I expect now we'll be saying names like Robert Smith or Steven Morrissey and get quizzical looks, "um.. yeah... huh huh... aren't they like, the ice-cream guys or something... huh huh... huh"
Jeez
You whippersnappers, listen up:
Back when I was your age, we didn't have color screens. Back then, a gui was something you pulled out of your nose.
When I was your age, we loaded programs onto our computers using cassette tapes. We waited 20 minutes for the program to load up, and if we were lucky, it ran.
When I was your age, we didn't have C compilers that were free. We had BASIC, and if you were lucky, you had Pascal.
Back when I was your age, a 9800 baud was one thrilling piece of hardware.
We had computers that weighed over 100 pounds.
AND WE WERE GLAD.
Parent
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Funny)
Back when I was your age, we didn't have color screens.
Well, ol' man, back when I was your age, we didn't have monochrome monitors. We had punch cards, card readers and a line printer. Yessir.
When I was your age, we loaded programs onto our computers using cassette tapes.
We carried shoeboxes full of punched cards over to the card reader. Woe unto those unfortunate souls who dropped theirs.
We had BASIC, and if you were lucky, you had Pascal.
We had Fortran, PL1, Assembler and JCL.
Back when I was your age, a 9800 baud was one thrilling piece of hardware.
Try 300 baud thru an acoustical coupler.
We had computers that weighed over 100 pounds.
The IBM 29 card punch weighed more than that. So did the Harris card reader. Lord knows what the IBM 360 mainframe weighed. The line printers needed paulbearers.
Parent
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Funny)
Now we know.
Davak
Parent
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Funny)
We had to send smoke signals in through a plastic funnel. Our printer was an old man carving output into a tree with a rock.
We had Fortran, PL1, Assembler and JCL.
We had Onetran, PL0, and French.
Try 300 baud thru an acoustical coupler.
Try making bleep noises down a piece of string through a tin can. 0.5 baud if the winds were favorable.
The IBM 29 card punch weighed more than [100lbs]
The Sears WonderBox 1900 was so heavy, it needed a special floor.
Parent
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they've just watched the Internet evolve into the greatest pornography distribution system the world has ever known. In 1994 it was hard to find any good free porn sites.. 1995 brought the businesses who locked down their porn and blurred it out for guests. Eventually the race to compete for customers brought us to the point where you can now just type in random URLs and get to a hardcore pornography site. Who needs to sit around on Jennicam.com hoping some 30+ year old chick takes her shirt off? God bless the Interweb and smut peddlers.
Parent
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at it this way: A(n occasionally naked) girl gets more votes from Internet users than Linus in a popularity contest. I would have been genuinely surprised if Linus had won. [Put your favorite Diebold/election fraud joke here!]
She -was- one of the first people I would consider a "net.celebrity" in that she'd gotten mainstream press coverage for what she was doing on her website. It wasn't a pr0n website by-and-large, although I have seen a few images from what must be early Jennicam that made it look like she was taking requests for nudity. The vast majority of the time I caught it, it was either her at her computer or out of the house or her cat on her computer chair or some crap.
I always saw it as more of a cam-blog, before there was "blogging" as we understand it today. You could peek in and see the new boyfriend or maybe a change she'd made to her furniture or whatever. Mundane, but still something that you checked out anyhow.
I can't say that I'll actively miss it (I haven't seen the site in probably over a year), but it does strike me as an end-of-an-era sort of thing. Jennicam came out in the "frontier" days of the Internet - a time where the general public didn't know what a URL was, before "camwhore" was a word, before the corporate world started to use it as a marketing tool. It was just some chick who put her life on the internet as sort of a diary or exhibitionistic social experiment. In that sense, I am sad to see her site go, because to me it represents that time now gone, and I'm a sap when it comes to that sort of thing.
Parent
end of life, universe and the internet (Score:5, Interesting)
webcrawler starts to suck
altavista goes static
google has problems with retricting searches (until recently try getting info on baseball in the UK!), bloggers etc
napster goes legit (but available only in the USofA)
MP3.com get bought by C-NEt and all the content 'gets lost'
now Jenni-cam is to be no more
well that's it, I'm off to desert to eat sand, the internet is dead
Re:end of life, universe and the internet (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:end of life, universe and the internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Closing when? (Score:5, Funny)
Um... I think she'll be closing sooner than that once we get through /.ing her.
I didn't know :-( (Score:5, Funny)
Closing Jennicam? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, perhaps Jenny's subscriptions were dropping as creepy men were finding other girls' webcams to ogle. Maybe Jenny realized that her extended 15 minutes of fame are finally up. No disrespect though. She certainly seems to have garnered all the attention she could from a webcam.
Remember the coffee cam? Now that was cool. Wasn't it at MIT?
Re:Closing Jennicam? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Closing Jennicam? (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is indeed true...and we can thank Jenni for that. I remember reading and finding the site in 1996 (which is when I first got broadband) and this was pretty hot shit at that time. Quite innovative--I believe I read about her in Wired. The fact that she lasted this long is actually amazing...and is a testament to her patience.
Not only did she invent this idea of camwhore (though camwhores usually perform on camera and eventually turn it off...at least, there won't be a good picture if they're not at the computer) Jenni wired her house with cameras (though that seems to have dropped off with time.)
This was of course a form of porn (figuratively and literally) and she might have even made a bit of profit in these years...much like the porn industry.
Camwhores still represent a troublesome frontier. 16 year old girls everywhere are taking off their clothes for free. Guys of all ages watch (and even if there weren't any watching, the girls would be doing it anyway.) That's gotta keep Ashcroft up late at night.
Parent
Re:Closing Jennicam? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Closing Jennicam? (Score:5, Interesting)
I (believe) that I'm the one who originally coined the term "camwhore". (My original registration of camwhores.com/camwhore.com predates any mention of it in google/usenet/archive.org, and the oldest web archive I can find is an IRC log of me).
The word "camwhores" itself was sort of a pun... Sure it had the sexual connotations, but we all were talking about how people who like the attention their webcams gave them struggled with the moral impact of showing random strangers on the internet more of their intimate life than most of their friends have seen. whore n. A person considered as having compromised principles for personal gain.
A whole industry of webcam portals, from Jennicam to Stile Project's old cam portals back in the 90's(which evolved into camwhores.com) to the huge sites that are out there now have really changed a lot of how porn works. You didn't have to sell your soul and have sex with strangers in a studio to play with your exhibitionist side. You don't have to make a cheesy home video and try to get your friends to watch it. The live nature of webcam porn lets the viewer interact with the person in front of the cam directly. And this isn't just a fringe minority either, do you really think the hundreds of thousands of webcams sold are just used to videoconference with grandma? When Gateway bundled a webcam with most of their college-geared desktops a year or so ago, the number of applicants on our site alone doubled.
However, the reason for this whole post(not just because of my personal involvement with the word)... The whole "Camwhores" scene is NOT about underage girls. All the major webcam portals, adult hosting sites, one-on-one show sites, and everyone else are really really strict about age verification and policing their content.
The last thing we need is Ashcroft running TV ads saying that webcams fund terrorists.
Anyway, Jenni was surely one of the big pioneers of this whole thing, and I wish her the best.
Parent
Re:Closing Jennicam? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, she told me she got a cam, and primitive software that loaded a new picture every minute, and she was showing it to me hosted off her dorm room Mac.
The images were black and white, and at that time Jenni was a really hot-looking girl. (I haven't looked lately, so I won't comment on her current status). It began as something private, a special moment or two shared between her and her friends.
For a while I even hosted her site, but eventually had to move due to the huge bandwidth use once she took it public.
For her, it was never about the money, it was about showing her life, as it was. I admired her for that and still do.
But she did wind up changing. For a long time, I had an archive featuring her most charming pictures, and if you were persistent enough, you could see her naughtiest. But she made me take it down, with a remarkably cold note threatening legal action. I thought that was contrary to the original spirit of it, but since I didn't want to hurt her, I respected her wishes.
So yes, today I shed a tear for her innovation, her charm and her creation. What a long strange trip it's been.
I wonder what she will do next
D
Parent
Well that sucks... (Score:5, Funny)
Jenni is just maturing, is all (Score:5, Funny)
- PreggyCam.org
- MommyCam.org
- MenopausyCam.org
- NannyCam.org
- CoffinCam.org
Jumped the Shark... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Jumped the Shark... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Jumped the Shark... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm still going to miss her.
Parent
Am I the only one ... (Score:5, Funny)
Much more interesting camgirl (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike Jenni, she is actually an interesting writer. She tackles wide-ranging and amusing subjects like why girls should only sleep with computer geeks (link [mercatur.net]) to advice on how to give good head to a guy (link [mercatur.net]).
She is also extremely cute. [mercatur.net] And single, I believe
Re:Much more interesting camgirl (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Much more interesting camgirl (Score:5, Funny)
Although I did see a girl today whose chest was as flat as the underside of a motherboard.
Parent
Re:Much more interesting camgirl (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Much more interesting camgirl (Score:5, Informative)
"Don't vary your speed"?!? {shakes head sadly}
Going to another woman for advice on how to give good head is like the blind leading the blind. Ask a gay man for tips, ladies. We actually know of what we speak. :)
Parent
Re:Much more interesting camgirl (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Much more interesting camgirl (Score:5, Interesting)
Anwering my own question: She is "...currently a circulation manager at a publishing house."
After seeing her "got root?" T-Shirt I just HAD to know what system she's running. According to her faq [mercatur.net] she uses "...Photoshop 5.5, ImageReady for compression, notepad for html..."
Photoshop and Imageready, fine, you need Windows for that. Fair enough. Most professional web designers I know are stuck with windows (though the clever ones use crossover office), whether they want to or not.
However, no self respecting linux geek would resist the chance to make it known to the public that they like either emacs or vim. I mean, notepad? Yeah, sure, I'm happy she can throw some markup together, nevermind the fact that she's not adhering to standards, it's still better than the stuff WYSIWYG editors spew out their little iso-8859-1 orifaces.
...and you know what, I wouldn't even be so upset about all this if it wasn't for your misrepresentation of her.
I mean, sure she has an appreciable interest in technology, built her desktops herself, does manage her own page, likes geeks. But fair warning to other web designers: if you want something pretty to look at whilst discussing the lack of standards in web content, or the lack of design within sites, I have the suspicion that you might be disappointed.
...though I'd very truly love to be proven wrong about her.
Parent
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Who went to a Jennicon? (Score:5, Interesting)
She's just a gen-Y pothead. (She and her then boyfriend smoked Pot the whole time, and didn't offer us any. I finally got her to pass me the bong and TreeH got nervous in case they saw me doing it on the cam).
I think she was part of some national psychological program to profile us Internet Whackos. Whatever. I was there.
age comments ... hee, hee (Score:5, Insightful)
Hee, hee ... I just love the wtf, she must be , like, 27 or even 30 now! Of course she has to quit! posts ...
Yes, egads, how could a 27-30 year old woman possibly be attractive? :o
Hmm, maybe I should just be glad that there is a whole segment of the population too stupid to give me any competition ;)
Continental Drift (Score:5, Funny)
Thank god we've still got the thrill-a-minute continental drift cam [pfeiffer.net].
Much more intelligent. And more exciting.
:-)
Pete.Interview (Score:5, Interesting)
I've Got It! I've Got It! (Score:5, Funny)
I need to make you mine,
Jenni, don't change your number:
64.141.14.2 (Chorus) 64.141.14.2!
This is a big moment (Score:5, Interesting)
And, yes, I was one of the ones who thoguh she was cute. Still do, too. :D
Good-bye, Jenni.
A pioneer.... (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife and I worked with her to produce "The Jennishow," a series of streaming video shows about her crazy life, which changed the course of our company, and without it there never would have been a "Geeks in Space" Slashdot radio show.
We had a lot of fun filming "The Jennishow," including going for a ride in a private plane of a fan, JenniCon with the "top fans", and another fan leading us to the house at the end of the Blair Witch Project. It was a trip!
Re:too old? (Score:5, Funny)
Jennie used the camera as a medium of self expression and speech, a means and method of recording her life for all to see on the internet. Jenniecam really was purely a social experiment.
She will be greatly missed.
Parent
Maybe not to you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe not to you, but to Joe Public it does. In fact, the preponderance of webcams may have had something to do with the rise in popularity of reality TV. Here in the UK, we get Fame Academy, Big Brother, Celebrity Big Brother, and a slew of tedious TV shows that someone must be watching for them to stay on air. Maybe the majority of Slashdotters are just too cynical to be swayed by that sort of thing, but there are plenty of people who are convinced other peoples lives are somehow better than their own, and therefore worthy of viewing.
Parent