WASHINGTON -- Until Monica Lewinsky emerged yesterday from weeks of obscurity, there wasn't much going on in front of her lawyers' office building at 1100 Connecticut Ave. N.W. For weeks, as America's favorite former intern remained ensconced in California, news cameramen 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/monica cam -- hoping against hope that Monica might be back.
The "Monicacam" -- which had a field day yesterday -- 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 Monica 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. 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. yesterday, with Monica back in the news after completing an immunity deal with Kenneth W. Starr, traffic on the page had surged from a morning average of just 40 hits an hour to more than 300. And when Monica at long last exited a cab in the middle of the street and hurried into her lawyers' building, uttering not a word to the assembled masses, Orr's camera caught the scene for all the Web to see.
"When she walked out of the cab, I was able to get her," Orr said. "You could even see that she was wearing a blue suit."
Indeed, if like Orr you're into Monica, you're hardly alone. 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.
The cyber-Monica selection is as sweeping as a Starr subpoena: jokes, discussion boards, chat rooms, articles, court documents, editorials, audio clips, video clips, photos, doctored photos, poems, songs, stories, surveys, screensavers, dolls, T-shirts, buttons, cartoons, games, graphics, charts, conspiracy theories and astrology charts.
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/gold-awards/ index.html) bestows "best in class" awards for humor, opinion, news, information and links.
Michael Erbschloe, editor of Exopa Terra, says Lewinsky is second only to the late Princess Diana in the number of pages created in her honor. And, as with Diana, the degree of tastefulness ranges widely.
Some online pornography distributors, for example, use Lewinsky's name and the promise of illicit photos of her to attract Web surfers to their pay-for-membership sites.
But for the serious student of d'affaire Lewinsky, there are pages such as Zippergate News (www. students.uiuc.edu/ (tilde)ritterbu/ scandal.html), offering an archive of newspaper articles related to the scandal.
"The Web is as close to a reflection of society at large as we have," says Erbschloe. "Some people have undertaken serious marketing and advertising efforts. Some of the other stuff is really pretty disgusting."
A little funny
Perhaps the most unusual Web pages come from people like Orr -- those who either "have a sense of humor, or nothing else to do," as 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 Clinton and Lewinsky are superimposed on famous works of art.
Other Lewinsky sites are the handiwork of men who claim to be hopelessly smitten with the former intern. Consider the "I Love Monica Lewinsky" page (http: // home.earthlink.net/ (tilde)brainiac1), widely regarded as the most breathless of the bunch.
"Monica, oh Monica, why do I love you so?" the author muses. "Is it those ample lips? Or that sweet, innocent heart that trusted that no-good friend, Linda Tripp?"
"It's a pathetic attempt to get her to notice me -- and maybe she has," says the site's creator, a 24-year-old systems manager from California who would give his name only as Tony -- out of fear, he says, of the Secret Service.
The page, which Tony says has had 90,000 visitors since Jan. 28, offers a gallery of Monica images, including her baby and prom pictures.
To ensure that he has the most Lewinsky pictures on the Web, Tony pores over major magazines for photos of her. He also keeps a blank tape in his VCR, in case an image in a Lewinsky report on TV should catch his eye.
Out of respect for the far from obscure object of his desire, Tony says, he solicits no advertising for his page. "I don't want to cheapen Monica's name by making money off it," he says.
His infatuation, he says, is gen- uine. "I just think she's really pretty -- and really bad," he says approvingly. "She's a bad girl. Even if she did half of [what has been alleged], that's bad."
Though he describes himself as a conservative, Tony does not blame President Clinton for the alleged affair. "If I was him, I would totally do it," he explains. "I mean, look at her. Jeez! How could you turn her down?"
Is he obsessed? If so, he's surely not the only one. Tony says he talks frequently with operators of other sites, trading pictures and discussing the pages -- a virtual network of Lewinsky addicts.
But there are those for whom Lewinsky Web pages can be serious business. Others, not just porn sellers, are looking to capitalize on a Monica-related Web address to draw consumers' attention to their products.
One such address, www.lewin sky.com, is home to an online bookstore affiliated with mega-bookseller Amazon.com. The owner is Brett Robbins, a graduate student who says he bought the site address to keep it out of the hands of Clinton-haters.
The site specializes in books about scandals and loosely defined controversies -- its only connection to Lewinsky besides the name -- and Robbins says all proceeds are donated to charity.
The most obvious name for a Lewinsky site -- www.monicalew insky.com -- was quickly snapped up by a company that says it has reserved it for Lewinsky herself "to use to convey to the American People, the TRUE Story of the White House incident."
"It would be her page," says Raul Heredia, vice president of the company, SiteLeader.com. "And she would get to state exactly what she wants to state, without a reporter slanting her story."
SiteLeader.com has attached just one condition to its offer: that the page include a link back to the company's own Web site.
Other entrepreneurs peddle tangible Monica paraphernalia.
At www.clintoncards.com, you can order a set of 40 "mint condition glossy-coated cards" of the key players in the Lewinsky matter, from Vernon Jordan to Kathleen Willey, for $14.95 a set.
"My parents are Democrats, and they won't even talk to me about it," says Daniel Yaman, the businessman behind the cards.
Page operators explain the proliferation of Lewinsky sites by noting the combination of a salacious presidential scandal and the ease of online communication.
"It's the nature of this particular scandal," said Christopher Burke, who runs a Clinton Joke-of-the-Day page (www.io.com/ (tilde)cj burke/clinton.html). "With Filegate or Whitewater, you can't make the same connection to it. But you hear about a sex scandal and it's: 'Ooh, now I have a chance to tell dirty jokes!' "
In the six months since the Lewinsky scandal broke, Burke says, his page has had more than 500,000 hits.
Robert Sherman runs a Lewinsky anagram page at www.quiz land.com/monicagrams.html ("My known CIA lies" is his favorite). Sherman says he believes many operators are in fact drawn by the prospect of having thousands view the fruits of their labor.
"Because a lot of pages are advertiser-supported, and just as an ego thing, it's better to have several thousand viewers than to have 10," he said.
Richard Davis says he created a page of links to other Monica-related sites (www.startingpage. com/html/monica.html) just to see how much Web traffic he could get. The site has drawn an average of 60,000 hits a day, he says -- a number roughly equivalent to the population of Dundalk or Bethesda.
Self-expression
Dorothy Denning, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, suggests that the Lewinsky mania "really demonstrates the power of technology in the way it empowers just anybody to get out there and express themselves in a way that can reach a lot of people."
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?" Baroudi says. "Is the Internet any more stupid than the rest of the press? I don't think so.
"The Internet works as a magnifier and an amplifier, and it amplifies the good and the bad."
But 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 e-mail. "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.
"If it weren't so sad, it would be funny."
Pub Date: 7/29/98