While it's barely a memory for most people, I remember in the late 90's being fascinated with a little Web site called HereAndNow.net. It was a bunch of college kids living together in a house near Oberlin College, wire up with streaming Web cameras. At the time, this was fairly groundbreaking stuff. It didn't look all that bad either. (Old Salon article here.)
I'll be the first to admit that there was a certain voyeuristic and creepy tendency about the whole thing, but I looked at it like The Real World without editing. Reality TV had not yet caught on at that point beyond TRR, and things like YouTube weren't even remotely on the radar. This thing was way ahead of its time.
The "cast" also kept online journals in conjunction with the site, which was long before anyone uttered the word "blog" out loud. The combination caused you to really care about the "characters" on the site in a way that nothing else could at the time.
These days the site is just some spam ad site, which is such a shame. I wonder what happened to the guy who started it, and his housemates.
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