America is beginning to embrace its first celebrity superstar of cyberspace. It is no billionaire Bill Gates clone, no online rock star, nor a web fanzine writer.
It is a thoroughly average, pretty but slightly fulsome 21-year-old called Jennifer Ringley. Everything about the Washington DC resident is normal; she wears trendy twentysomething fashions, dates a guy with a goatee, and likes to roam around her bedroom with a towel on her head while she paints her nails and talks on the phone.
But the very unusual thing about Jenni is that she does all these things - dressed and undressed - while anyone in the world can watch her every move.
The giggly, unprepossessing college grad has become the talk of the Internet since she placed a camera in her bedroom and let it take pictures of anything and everything she does - and then posts the images on her own web site.
Over 5,000 people - and the number grows every day - have paid a US$15 (HK$116) subscription to watch a new image of her boudoir behaviour flash up every three minutes. And her JenniCAM site gets more than 100 million hits a week. Even for nothing, she will send you a new image every half an hour.
Although your average cyberperv could pay for regular online pornography, the Jenni phenomenon seems to be appealing to men in an entirely different way. Perhaps it should be called the voyeur syndrome - since the cinema verite experience of watching a young woman undressing and occasionally making out with her boyfriend - but above all just being herself - is what truly seems to be setting Jenni's web site on fire.