MINUTES after the hoax warning of a bomb in O'Connell Street was phoned to the BBC in Belfast on Thursday, gardai moved in to begin clearing the street - and The Irish Times on the Web found itself with an unexpected scoop.
Since early June, the electronic edition of the paper has maintained a "Web cam" pointing at O'Connell Bridge and Lower O'Connell Street. The digital camera provides images, updated every 30 seconds, to the Web site (http://www. irish-times.com) where the electronic edition is published. Once a user has brought up the camera page, hitting the "reload" button gets the latest picture. Typically, the traffic has moved on, or the crowds waiting to cross the street have changed - there isn't enough detail to pick out individuals, or even recognise individual cars.
Until last week, the most unusual event for the camera was the two young women who appeared on O'Connell Bridge holding up a placard with birthday greetings to their brother in Australia. But as the gardai cordoned off the street the camera had a perfect view: barriers going up, the traffic disappearing, crowds of evacuated workers gathering outside the barriers.
Every 30 seconds a fresh image was available worldwide, to anyone who wanted to look in, until the alert was lifted that evening. For a few hours the Web edition was covering a breaking news event, rather than carrying news gathered for the paper itself. While it might be a first for O'Connell Bridge, the Webcam idea is not new, of course. The original, in a college computer lab in Cambridge, predates the Web itself. The coffee camera (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html) began with an experiment in ATM networking in 1991, when researchers from several parts of the building put the technology they were developing to work to ensure that they knew when a fresh pot had been brewed. An Archimedes computer with a "frame grabber" was used to turn the output from a video camera pointed at the coffee machine into still pictures, updated every second or two.
"This system took us only a day or two to construct but was rather more useful than anything else I wrote when I was working on networks," Quentin StaffordFraser wrote afterwards. "It also made a better topic of conversation at dinner parties than ATM protocols."
The coffee camera would have died with the end of the ATM project, but for two others at the lab, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson, who resurrected it for a worldwide audience over the Web and a new form of self expression was born.
Watching the level of the coffee rise and fall in the pot over the course of the day may seem like an exercise in pointlessness, but it added a new dimension to Web page content. Instead of still pictures, text and short prerecorded video clips, surfers could see regularly updated stills - it was a first glimpse of real time Web visuals.
The coffee cam was an oddity in its day, but it has long been overtaken in the variety, ingenuity and plain weirdness of Webcam sites. Hawaii, Nova Scotia, York and New York all have outdoor vistas on the Web. Some of the better ones provide more than a view. Clicking on an area of the picture will either zoom it in, or produce information about the building you have clicked on.
Not far behind are the office views, from Adam Curry of MTV fame to the aptly named Ralph Dosser, of the University of Tennessee (his camera could not be reached on Friday). There have been labcams which let viewers manipulate experiments and a garden which viewers could help to tend by remote control.
The first fishtank was news, but then so was the first parrot, the first iguana, the first. . . well first one placed under a desk, broadcasting its owner's feet to the world is still pretty unusual. Laurence Gilbert maintains a list of links to these and the other Webcams of the world on his "Web voyeur" page (http://www.eskimo.com/ irving/web-voyeur/).
Among the latest is a set of cameras maintained by HomeCom in Atlanta, one in its office, another pointing out across the Olympic village and the "undecided cam" sitting in a corner waiting to be put to use.
One reason for the blossoming camera culture is the simplicity and cheapness of putting up a Web cam. A simple camera like the black and white Connectix Quickcam can be bought for £70 or so if you really shop around. It comes with software to save either single shots or short, jerky "movies" to a computer. If that computer is already serving up Web pages to the world or has access to one that is - then all that's needed is some software tweaking to run the latest picture into the page automatically.
Running a Web cam isn't always trouble free, however. When Nick Rosen set up his Daily Planet (http://www.pi.net.uk/today/) on ine newspaper earlier this month he wanted to use Webcams. "We call them Paparazzi Cameras because they are pretty stupid: they just sit there all day taking photos until occasionally they get a really terrific snap." Rosen said.
Since the British Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, had announced plans to sell off the married quarters at military bases, the Planet decided to publish a live picture of his quarters - a London des res. The camera showed only the front door of the house, but complaints from the police followed - saying that the camera endangered security. Then the picture disappeared altogether.
As the Planet reported on July 5th: "The live feed from Michael Portillo's married quarters to the Daily Planet is being impeded by forces beyond our control. As you can see the Connectix Eyeball camera is still in place. But try to call up Portillo's Belgravia eyrie, and instead of the Defence Ministers small but perfectly formed residence, there is a great big `404 Not Found' sign."
It turned out that British Telecom had cut off access to the Portillo "home page", which was on a BT server.
Meanwhile, the owner of a restaurant in Northern Sweden found himself in a row last week because of the camera which broadcasts pictures of guests every 15 minutes. "Fun," said Ronny Pettersson, owner of the Izakaya Koi.
Illegal surveillance, said the Malmoe county authorities. "All wall mounted cameras require a permit," said Kerstin Almgren, of the county administrative board. "Normally we only give out permits for security reasons, such as to banks." She said the county had never been faced with such an issue and is still considering how to tackle it.
Later, in a different part of a different town (Dublin), club RiRa is celebrating its third birthday with a crowded Wednesday night party. Ropey Karaoke glides onto the stage in white robes, brandishing a two foot candle, to begin a hilarious set. The crowd lap it up - all except the ones glued to the Macintoshes in one corner.
As part of the Guinness Global Internet Gathering (http://www.guinness.ie) the Internet Exchange cybercafe has run in ISDN connections and set up shop. The Macintoshes can pick up sound and vision over the Internet from a similar party at the Knitting Factory in New York and several other sites.
The pictures are small and jerky, but it's a live connection, with live video. The equipment used is much more complex than what's needed for a Web cam, but far less complex and costly than distributing video without using the Internet.
A hand held camera pans the stage and the crowd, picking up club RiRa's contribution to the global party. Privacy isn't an issue.