Until Monica Lewinsky emerged on Tuesday from weeks of obscurity, there wasn't much going on in front of her lawyers' office building at 1100 Connecticut Avenue N.W. For weeks, as she remained ensconced in California, news camera crews moved their stakeouts elsewhere, and life pretty much returned to normal.
Yet throughout the lull, some of the most rabid Monica-junkies managed to keep up hope of catching a glimpse of her by viewing the building via a "Monicacam" on the World Wide Web. Roughly 500 times a day, someone visited the page - www.webdevs.com/monicacam - hoping against hope that Ms Lewinsky might be back.
The Monicacam is the online fan's best friend. It takes a snapshot of the building's entrance every 10 minutes between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. every day. The payoff? Assuming Ms Lewinsky is in town and the timing is just right, she's in your sights.
Your good fortune is due to the digital camera that sits atop Scott Orr's computer in his third-floor office, directly across Connecticut Avenue. Mr Orr, a Washington correspondent for New Jersey's Newark Star-Ledger newspaper, calls his surveillance a public service of sorts. "I just found myself with this view," he says, "and I figured I'd might as well share it."
By 1.30 p.m. on Tuesday, with Ms Lewinsky back in the news after completing an immunity deal with prosecutor Mr Kenneth Starr, traffic on the page had surged from a morning average of just 40 hits an hour to more than 300. And when Ms Lewinsky at long last emerged from a cab in the middle of the street and hurried into her lawyers' building, Mr Orr's camera caught the scene for all the Web to see.
The Monicacam is just one of a multitude of Lewinsky pages that have sprung to life over the past six months - a crowd that, according to the online journal, Exopa Terra, now numbers about 300.
There are so many Web pages devoted to Monica, in fact, that one - www.gomonica.com - now ranks the "Top 100 Monica Sites" (Monicacam has just moved into No. 1) and offers an all-Lewinsky search engine. Another site (www.bossdog.com/goldawards/index.html) bestows "best in class" awards for humour, opinion, news, information and links.
Michael Erbschloe, editor of Exopa Terra, says Ms Lewinsky is second only to Princess Diana in the number of pages created in her honour. And, as with Diana, the degree of tastefulness ranges widely.
There are pages such as Zippergate News (www.students.uiuc.edu/ritterbu/scandal.html), offering an archive of newspaper articles related to the scandal.
Perhaps the most unusual Web pages come from people like Mr Orr - those who either "have a sense of humour, or nothing else to do," as Mr Erbschloe puts it. They have created pages on everything from "The Islamic Viewpoint on the Lewinsky-Clinton `affair' " to the "Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal Fine Art Gallery," where the faces of Mr Clinton and Mr Lewinsky are superimposed on famous works of art.
Carol Baroudi, a Boston-based lecturer on technology and society and author of The Internet for Dummies, sees nothing worrisome for society about the hundreds of Lewinsky Web pages. "Is this any crazier than the media coverage?" Mr Baroudi asked.
"The Internet works as a magnifier and an amplifier, and it amplifies the good and the bad."
David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University and a frequent writer on culture and technology, takes a more jaundiced view. "We like to talk up new technology for high-minded reasons - TV was going to foster adult education, likewise home computers, and the Web has all sorts of elevated social purposes," he writes in an email. "But game-playing is the biggest home-computer (application), and shopping, pornography and gossip account for an awful lot of Web traffic.
"Modern American culture has no dignity because it has no self-respect - it hates itself, with reason," he adds.
