Webcam Pioneer

[JerryBoBerry]

In another thread someone mentioned pioneers of the business. It got me thinking about the very first 'camgirl' I ever saw. Living in the Twin Cities area back in the 90's when webcams were first becoming popular, the craze was to set up a webcam and show it off to the world. People would point them at their aquarium, or use it to keep an eye on their dogs while they were at work. People would just show aspects of their life to the world. I know people still do this but it is nothing like the heyday of webcams early days.

A local woman by the name of Ana Voog, who is a performance artist, decided to set up a webcam in her living room. She lived in a small apartment so the futon in her living room was also where she slept. In those days it was not continuous video like now. Instead, the dial up connections would only allow software to take pictures every so often and upload them to the webpage. So she turned it on and started showing her life, every aspect of it. Twenty four hours a day through boring times, people visiting, sleeping, illnesses and yes sex. It was letting people view the happenings in her apartment continuously starting August 22nd, 1997.

It was the second homecam to be turned on 24/7 in the world. Sadly in August 2009 on the 12th anniversary she ended the live broadcast, at the time hers was the oldest homecam on the internet. But according to her website she's working with dreamweaver trying to come back.

So if you want to check out a true pioneer give her site a look sometime you have a few free minutes.
http://www.anacam.com/
It still has random photos from the past showing and her content is still there including archived photos.

To all the current models visiting there think about this woman being on cam every day all day, showing nudity for the first time, sleeping, bathing, eating, even conceiving and birthing her first child on cam. And she was doing this before many of you were even in kindergarten.

This, in my opinion, was a pioneer in the field. If you want to read more about her, Wiki has a good entry on her too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Voog

 

[camstory]

somehow I missed this in my research of web cam history, or had forgotten about it, but thank you for info. What I had found listed as the earliest web cam was Jennicam, a web cam set up pretty much exactly as what you have described above. The web cam of Jennifer Ringley, started as a feed that uploaded a picture every three minutes (I believe), of her college dorm room. I do not remember all the details, of the Jennicam but the basics can be seen at the Jennifer Ringley Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley , though from what I can remember there is a lot more information available on the Jennicam experience out there.

 

[zippypinhead]

Uncanny. I was just talking about Ana Voog to someone somewhere. I don't know if it was here or elsewhere, but it was in relation to the subject of "webcams as performance art" emerging before "webcams as adult entertainment" really took hold. I even went to her site recently on a trip to the past and looked at her old pic archive. I actually got into her camming because of her music, which I found via a strange "infomercial" on an obscure cable channel that played only infomercials. Sometimes, late at night, they were more like art pieces to sell records by indie artists. This was circa 1998 or 1999, maybe? (I also discovered Elliott Smith this way, because the same channel would periodically show Strange Parallel.) I still possess the album Anavoog.com in my cd library. I actually decided to break it out and give it a listen, for nostalgia's sake. It holds up alright, as far as 90's wierdo dreamy-housey synth pop goes. The cd is cool, too, because it played around with a lot of digital multimedia functions, embedding videos in and stuff like that. In fact, my computer recognizes it as a data disc, and has to be told that it's a music cd. Think about that for a second -- cds that contained music, video clips, and pictures, and could lead you to an internet website(!) used to be technology's endgame, and people used to rely on media outlets like odd television channels and alternative press magazines and newspapers in order to discover interesting new stuff and be hip. And it wasn't that long ago. (I still listen to Elliott Smith all the time, by the way. Figure 8 is an almost perfect album. But I digress.)

There was a handful of women who did this at the time, like Jennicam, as camstory had mentioned, but Voog was by far the most interesting, long-lived, and memorable. She took it very seriously for a long time. On a personal level, Anacam really played into my naturally voyeuristic tendencies and my attraction to strange cosmic artsy chicks. Being a night person, I remember watching her sleep a lot while I worked on other stuff -- which I guess is where I can credit developing the habit of putting on cam girls while I work even now.

She was also a personal blogging pioneer. She was an early adopter of Livejournal, I recall, and got pretty popular pretty quickly. I signed up for Livejournal just to be able to comment on her posts. I still have the damned account. It'll be twelve years old in two weeks.

Anyway, now I feel like an old man, a keeper of living history, yet mostly fumbling around with all of these new-fangled technologies and cultures that have developed around them.

 

[AmberCutie]

Reminds me of a documentary I watched not too long ago called We Live in Public.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Live_in_Public

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/

 

[JerryBoBerry]

somehow I missed this in my research of web cam history, or had forgotten about it, but thank you for info. What I had found listed as the earliest web cam was Jennicam, a web cam set up pretty much exactly as what you have described above. The web cam of Jennifer Ringley, started as a feed that uploaded a picture every three minutes (I believe), of her college dorm room. I do not remember all the details, of the Jennicam but the basics can be seen at the Jennifer Ringley Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley , though from what I can remember there is a lot more information available on the Jennicam experience out there.

I remember Jennicam too. I'm thinking if 'someone' wanted to write up a short history of that and post it in this thread it would be awesome. :whistle: Maybe turn this into a history of camming. There's several of us here that remember the days before there was even a world wide web. The younguns might be interested, like mom's spaghetti, to know how stuff like this took root.

And hey, eventually I'm sure it will devolve into stories about how we had to walk 10 miles in the snow to school, uphill both ways of course. And gosh, what old fogey doesn't relish a chance for that to happen.