Why does the popularity of "the first person of webcast" come from the coffee pot?

After Linley, the second blogger to launch Live Live is American artist Anna Vogg. From August 22, 1997, Vogg began to broadcast live his family life online, from pregnancy to childbirth. As an avant-garde artist, Vogg is very good at using the Internet to show himself and interact with fans. By contrast, Lin Li's Live Live is authentic and naturally carved.

People watched the young girl's daily life with curiosity, and when she was noticed by mainstream media such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, her eyes were mostly well-intentioned.

Until later, after the intimate scene of Lin Li and her boyfriend appeared in the live broadcast, public opinion began to change, and some people began to call her "narcissism", "love show" and "hype".... Just like what happened to some Reality Show programs and webcast blogs later.

After some nude scenes caused controversy and hackers attacked, Linley turned off the camera in December 2003, ending Jennicam7's life span of eight months and has largely disappeared from the online world ever since. In an interview in 2007, she admitted that she was "enjoying a private life".

Alex Goldman, host of the well-known podcast reply to all, is also a fan of Jennicam and interviewed Lin Li in 2014. For Goldman, Linley's charm as a live blogger is "ordinary". People will open her personal web page on a weekend night, fold sheets and watch the girl wash clothes and feel that she has a companion. Because Lin Li in the camera is a living person, living a plain and real life like many people. At that time, Reality Show was not yet popular, and we had not yet learned to discover and hate the "performance" elements in it.

The chat room on Lin Li's personal website has gradually become a community, and Lin Li himself often lingers in it, chatting with fans like friends. In the days when online shopping, online chatting and online dating were not yet popular, Lin Li was the first phenomenal "online celebrity" who injected "humanity" into the cold computer network world.

As the first generation of "online celebrities", she was also the first to trigger a discussion about the online world snooping into personal privacy and the boundaries of "digital sharing". Linley, 40, changed her husband's surname to Jennifer Johnson and now works as a computer programmer in Sacramento, California. The past of "the first person in webcast" may be just a youth experiment for her.

Jennifer Linley's Jennicam set a precedent for live-action anchors. Apart from "the first", it was also because there were so few competitors for so many years. In the field of online photography at that time, Jennicam's strongest competitors were a "coffee pot live broadcast" and a "fish tank live broadcast".

In terms of birth time, Coffee Pot Live is three years earlier than Jennicam. But its "protagonist" is not a person, but a most common coffee percolator, whose coordinates are the former main computer laboratory of the University of Cambridge in England, known as the "Troy Room". The picture is updated at a rate of about three frames per minute, and viewers can see that the coffee in the coffee pot is full, less, and poured out. And this is the original intention of the photographer, a group of computer technology researchers at the University of Cambridge.

This group of earliest IT scholars are distributed in different laboratories and offices on different floors, sometimes to pour a cup of coffee, only to find that they have run out of coffee.

So two doctors who studied computers came up with a very "technical man" style: set up a camera to monitor the status of the coffee pot and wrote a program so that researchers in the department could watch the pictures through the internal computer system. You can know if there is coffee in the coffee pot, so you don't have to go there for nothing.

Later, Martin Johnson, another doctor from Cambridge University, wanted to test what the then fledgling World wide Web could do and decided to practice with this program for monitoring coffee pots. So on November 22, 1993, "Coffee Pot Live" landed on the Internet and became an international star from the computer building of Cambridge University.

The coffee pot is "red", especially among computer researchers around the world. Dr. Quentin Stafford-Fraser, one of the authors of the idea of monitoring the coffee pot, remembers that there was an e-mail from his Japanese counterparts asking them to leave a lamp in the lab at night. so that researchers in different time zones can observe the picture of the coffee pot at any time.

The Visitor Information Office of the University of Cambridge has one more job: to guide visitors from the United States to the laboratory to see the coffee pot for themselves. In the words of Stafford Fraser, probably nothing he has done in his life has received as much attention as this coffee pot, "and it was just a strange idea that occurred one afternoon."

"Coffee Pot Live" has survived for a decade and has many fans around the world as the founder of the webcast industry, but its designers feel that the relevant programs and devices are old and it is time to "move on." As the computer lab of Cambridge University moved into the new building, the designer decided to end the mission of "Live Coffee Pot" on August 22, 2001. Fans around the world wailed when the last picture posted online showed scientists' fingers pressing the camera's "off" button.

In fact, there were four or five coffee pots that appeared in the webcast. The last coffee pot was later auctioned for 3350 pounds on Yibei. The buyer was Der Spiegel of Germany. After the change of ownership, the coffee pot quickly "be yourself": continue to make coffee. It was only last summer that it really "retired" and was rented to the German Museum of Technology for collection and exhibition. (Shen Min) (special draft by Xinhua News Agency