College student Jennifer Kaye Ringley turns on her "JenniCam" for the first time and begins uploading pictures of herself to the web. Refreshed every three minutes, JenniCam.org displays black-and-white images that track Ringley's daily activities, which ranges from mundane tasks and chitchat to stripteases and sexual activity.

Raised as a nudist, 19-year old Ringley installed the webcam in her dorm room at Pennsylvania's Dickinson College as an experiment in real-time documentary. The site, however, became far more than an academic exercise, attracting up to 4 million hits a day at its peak.

When she relocated to Washington, D.C., in 1998, Ringley added three more webcams and began charging through PayPal for "premium" access to more-frequent image uploads. Earning her living from the site, Ringley emerged as a web-empowered cult of personality. She played a geek character in 1998 on TV series Diagnosis Murder, appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman and landed the cover of Modern Ferret magazine with one of her much-viewed pets.

Ringley also received death threats after teen pranksters hacked the site and demanded that she "show more" following one of her strip shows.

Less controversial: Ringley's departure from Washington to Sacramento, California, for which she live-streamed moving day. But even here, soap opera intruded. Commenters complained that Ringley seemed too friendly with her friend's fiancee, Dex, who helped pack boxes.

Employed in California first as a social worker and then a web designer, Ringley shut down JenniCam.org on Dec. 31, 2003. She blamed the closure on PayPal's new anti-nudity policy.

For better and for worse, Ringley's pioneering adventure in self-exposure anticipated the appetite for reality-based voyeurtainment. Ana Voog followed suit with her popular Anacam.com, as did scores of other lifecasters.

As chronicled in the documentary We Live in Public, net mogul Josh Harris webcast his life inside a bunker loaded with surveillance cameras. Big Brother launched the reality-TV genre by broadcasting private behavior to mainstream audiences. And web phenomenon lonelygirl15 took the JenniCam model as a starting point for scripted confessional-style drama.

Ringley keeps a low profile these days. "I really am enjoying my privacy now," Ringley told the VH-1 cable network in 2007. "I don't have a web page. I don't have a MySpace page. It's a completely different feeling, and I think I'm enjoying it."

Source: Wikipedia, The Great Geek Manual

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