Live, on Web, a Guy Leading a Boring Life

Vance Kozik is an Internet voyeur’s dream. The 33-year-old Orange County man has launched “The Nerdman Show,” a site on the World Wide Web that broadcasts images from 15 cameras that follow his life.

See Kozik staring at his computer at StarDot Technologies in Buena Park, which makes these Web cameras. Check out the hamster’s cage or the fish tank. Spy on his cat slinking around the den.

Yawn.

“My life is really not very interesting,” admits Kozik, who has nine cameras scattered throughout his house and six others at work. “Mine is really a story about absolutely nothing. It’s live nothing.”

Thousands of sites similar to Kozik’s have emerged, creating a global slide show featuring anything from holiday family snapshots to a Florida woman giving birth live on the Net. Nothing is sacred and few sites are particularly interesting. What’s the point of checking out the Beach Cam, with its continual shot of the Venice Beach boardwalk, if you can’t feel the sunshine?

And last week, one of the year’s biggest Internet hoaxes was debunked when the two 18-year-olds who invited the world to watch them lose their virginity on the Web announced that they were neither 18 nor virgins and were not planning to have sex.

Still, like the early days of television, people are drawn to these sites out of curiosity and “just because it’s possible to peek into someone else’s life,” Kozik said. He should know: Nearly 200 people a day check out his site, at https://www.reallifetruman.com.

“I predict that once real-time video and audio transmission gets better, we’re going to see all these amateur television stations pop up everywhere on the Web,” Kozik said. “If you stop to think about it, that’s a quite frightening prospect.”

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P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com.