i’m just wondering… am I a webcamgirl?

What’s a girl got to do to be a part of the Electronic Frontiers Forum track.. namely be a webcamgirl. Oh wait.. I guess it would be currently have a web cam. =) Oh, that’s so a year and a half ago. The more I think about it, though, the more I totally have in common with those people, and it strikes me as just a little strange.

When I first got into html and doing my own website, I was all about trying to take artsy picts of myself and put them up.. no streaming web cam then, but regularly updated photos… and I’ve done plenty on the risque side in my time, I have to say. I used to be amazed at the amount of random feedback my site was getting, and wonder how these people found me without me ever really telling anybody about the site. Later on, technology increased, the site got revamped a time or two, and for a while there was not only a live streaming web cam, but also streaming shoutcast audio of what I was currently listening to at home. Geeky, yes. More pictures. More fun. More feedback. But somehow, when I hit the point that I wanted to register my own domain, I had gone past the point where I found updating the website all the time fun…. perhaps because I was now doing that for a living. So the domain is meager.. the web cam is sitting here staring at me, but not streaming anymore, and only good for random new LJ icons, or whatever else I want to capture and send JT in the middle of the night.

Oh well.. it was just strange to think about. All of those questions asked of those girls on the panel, I could totally answer. Have you ever gotten gifts as a result of your site? Sure.. some guy in california used to send me tapes of his band. Several people have written wanting me to read their stories and critique them. People involved with various webrings even found my site and asked me to join their webrings… most now defunct. Heh, I even found that some funky porn site had gone in and swiped all my meta tags information and placed it on one of their doorway pages… imagine my surprise one day doing a google search for “Flerly” (like I’m apt to do) and finding a porn site. I instantly wondered what pictures they’d snagged from me. Thankfully that site is also now defunct.

And there are the other random emails… unsolicited pictures and inappropriate requests.. that have died down now since the last format change of the site to completely non-risque stuff. Heck, even the question “have you ever gotten a job as a result of your website?” i can answer hell yes to. I still have the email in my feedback section from the guy at Voyager that ended up hiring me about a year about he first found my site. It’s funny, because my reply to him at the time, when I noticed his job title, was to ask him for a job.

Even the other things like.. has anybody you worked with ever discovered something you’ve put on the web and the situation become… uncomfortable. Well, yes. Interesting to be recognized on site by a total stranger in a brand new city on about the second week of my current job. Needless to say THOSE pictures came down quickly, and thank goodness we’re friends now.. but it was still very very weird. And there’s the time that my brother-in-law heard that I had some family pictures up on my website, so he decided to give the URL out to some of his customers that he only ever talked to by phone so that they could see what he looked like…. well, silly man had never actually ever BEEN to my website, and as it turned out.. at the time, family pictures was merely one page of many pages of picture content, including some folks I had superimposed into pictures with sheep and a nice Laura Croft Nuderaider image. Of course, that wasn’t necessarily embarrassing for ME. =) But I have to admit, that certainly went beyond my expectations of the intended audience of the site.

It is mostly toned down now… what pictures that are still there are either just my favorites or too subtle to be recognized for what they are. It’s been that way for.. jeez.. three?!? years now? Damn… It’s weird to think about.

All in all… this particular con experience has made me start to wonder whether I might enjoy bringing my site back up to date and perhaps even hooking up the old web cam again… so people can watch me stare blankly at the monitors, pet the cat, and pick my nose from day to day.

Who knows. Something to think about.