The Webcam never lies

While I'm personally often happy to entertain people in my house, I'm not about to invite 80 million people to watch me drop my trousers, and then ask them to pay on the way out. But yet again the computer business shows me I have no imagination. Thanks to the internet, there's about 40,000 people doing this as you read.

Webcams are this year's must-have item for the geek with everything.

Do you know that Connectix alone has sold a million of them at #100 a throw? Not only that, but the company makes a big deal of the fact that the internet's most dedicated exhibitionists are getting them out on a QuickCam VR. It's another one of those happy accidents of internet technology where global communications, money and occasional nudity combine to bring people together for profit. Rather like Comdef.

Connectix, like Intel, Logitech, Panasonic and all the other manufacturers, produced Webcams for a laudable purpose - teleconferencing. With one of the little suckers mounted on top of your PC, you have a way to send pictures of yourself to others as a way of communicating. This has never really caught on, what with there being telephones and all, and the story of these little personal cameras could have stopped there, if it wasn't for the Webcam craze.

It appears from my extensive research over the past fortnight that, with a few minutes' work, you can rig up a Web page that will show a different picture from your Webcam every few seconds. My page shows my in-tray, which gradually piles up with unread press releases while its owner fiddles with HTML code. I'm hardly blazing a trail here - there are already pages showing people's kitchens, people's CD players, people's wardrobes. You can even find Webcams that show paint drying and grass growing. Is this a kind of performance art? If it is, it's even more boring than ballet.

But, of course, the vast majority of Webcam sites involve people taking their clothes off. There are even sites offering a menu of Webcam pages from bored housewives, young studs and impoverished students who broadcast on a pay-as-you-strip basis, charging visitors by the minute, like a cross between a brothel and a jukebox. In the spirit of pioneering research, I made my excuses and stayed at one site, as a young natural blonde from California swapped messages online with a posse of eager males, gamely flashing her front bottom next to her keyboard as she answered their questions:

Male 1: 'Do you do this for the money?'

Webcam girl: 'Oh no, I do it because I love to show off! What would you like me to do?'

Male 2: 'Have you ever done it with animals?'

Webcam girl: 'Not yet, although I might if you stick around long enough!'

So as you can see, nude Webcams will probably not be remembered as the internet's finest hour. They are, however, a lot more interesting than ballet dancing.

Tim Phillips is a freelance IT journalist.