JenniCam Closing After 7+ Years 605
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."
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:Closing Jennicam? (Score:3, Interesting)
Jumped the Shark... (Score:5, Interesting)
bound to happen (Score:2, Interesting)
When was the last time you heard of a 30-year-old porn star? That's functionally what she is, though she doesn't make a habit of actively showing her body, and is more actively showing her mind - pr0n for geeks, I guess. She actively pimps the image of her body and life.
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.
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember when your only choice for programming was assembler - or if you were unlucky, straight machine code, which you translated from some pseudo-assembler notes on paper.
I remember when high-level languages were rubbished for being inefficient, and only of academic interest (the same way natural language programming is viewed now).
And I remember that back then we had twits saying "you youngsters are hopeless, in my day we used punch-cards".
But, it really does make you feel old to hear of someone not knowing what Jennicam is. I guess she's faded into insignificance, because all the teenagers who watched her with the hope of seeing her naked have grown up.
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.
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.
Re:The end of an era... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Closing Jennicam? (Score:2, Interesting)
The German Magazine "Der Spiegel" bought the Coffee Machine (yes, its the real one!) and has it online now for a year or two, don't know exactly. Here it is:
Coffee Cam [spiegel.de]
From the CNN link (Score:3, Interesting)
Ringley says she will keep the site going indefinitely -- "I can't imagine any situation which would cause me to want to" take it down.
Ironic huh?
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.
Interview (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Continental Drift (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh man, you gotta check out the Slow Motion Mode [pfeiffer.net]... WTF??
Re:end of life, universe and the internet (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The truly amazing part (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:3, Interesting)
I jumped straight from dialing into local BBSes with a 2400 baud modem to getting a dial-up Internet connection with a 14.4 modem. THAT was an exciting upgrade! Some other notes to date me:
- I own an Atari 2600 (3rd gen. type). Yes, I have E.T. Lucky me.
- The first computer ever in my house was indeed tape-driven.
- I remember learning BASIC from the horrible manual in DOS 4.
- I remember having to "learn this new-fangled Windows".
- I remember the days when Apple ruled the world.
- I remember when "frames" was new technology for the WWW.
- I remember when animated GIFs were snazzy new technology (back in Ol' Netscape 3 - they're almost 10 years old).
- I'm only 22.
Compare that with folks today who don't know what a shell is, don't know what a command prompt is, have no idea what DOS is, much less any other Operating System...That's what sucks about computing. I'm actually so young, but I can still feel so old.
As for Jennicam, I remember when it first appeared, I don't care that "Jennicam is dying". Frankly, camwhores annoy me anyway. Shit, they spawned things like Goatse >:(
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:Am I the only one? (Score:2, Interesting)
My first "monitor" was a Teletype ASR33 and the front panel of my IMSAI. I had paper tape instead of punch cards!
We carried shoeboxes full of punched cards over to the card reader. Woe unto those unfortunate souls who dropped theirs.
The only punchcard I saw was the electric bill from Tampa Electric. Until I got into college. THEN came the shoeboxes full of card decks...
We had Fortran, PL1, Assembler and JCL.
Fortran, Assembler, COBOL, BASIC, and BDS C...
Try 300 baud thru an acoustical coupler.
My ASR33 had a 110 baud modem with a ROTARY dial built into it.
The IBM 29 card punch weighed more than that. So did the Harris card reader.........
I could almost swear that some of my card decks weighed more than the reader! LOL At least they seemed that way!!!
Nayah, nayah, nayah!!! (Gawd, I love trading barbs with other old timers!!! )
Open member's gallery to all as farewell (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking back, she reminds me of Sarah St-James. Girl-next-door looks that trip your sensor array, but don't explode it. Cute.
I stopped visiting her site the day her picture archive and pretty much anything of interest became a paying subscribtion. Maybe now would be a good time to make everything open-access, as a farewell gift to all, during the last month of operation?
I worked with her (Score:3, Interesting)
She was at Netscape at the same time I was.
Jenni moved to the suburbs of Sacramento, got fat & out of shape, and ended up picking up an office job with the County. heh.
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
Re:And... (Score:1, Interesting)
screw the Jennicam, I miss... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, Miss Frickell, when will you once again grace us with your visage?