I wouldn't regard myself as an exhibitionist but there is a kind of buzz once you've been on camera and you know there

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I wouldn't regard myself as an exhibitionist, but there is a kind of buzz once you've been on camera and you know there are people out there and they are interested in you. The average Internet user is a red-blooded male and he's happier searching for women taking their clothes off rather than looking at someone like me staring at a monitor."Although not an active churchgoer himself, he is a Christian and is keen to distance himself from this sleazier end of the Internet. "I don't know if it's because people aren't interested or it's just a bad day The girl sites get 20,000 hits a day Male cams are not half as popular. Although he says it started off as "a bit of a joke", he now has one camera at home and another at work, so that he can be observed throughout his waking day. "On a good day I'll probably take 200 hits, on a bad day 60 or 70," he says. Instead of just tapping away blind at a keyboard, he could direct people to his cam so that they could see what he looked like.

Some, but not all, chatrooms, are used as a way of meeting potential partners.The Wookie Cam was a development of his using chatrooms. In the early days of the Internet I used to go into chatrooms and an integral part of it is having a user name, and I used to sign myself in as The Wookie and now people all across the globe know me as that." Chatrooms are exactly what the term suggests, virtual rooms in which people chat, except they don't speak, they use their keyboard and have a whole shorthand vocabulary to speed things up. Before he got on to the webcam, he had already set up his own "page" or site, known as Wookie's Lair, in which he indulged his passion for Manchester City and science fiction, providing information, downloadable samples of TV programmes and City goals, and links to related sites Wookie is his online identity "The name Wookie came from Star Wars Chewbacca was a Wookie. He is wary of being labelled as a sad, single computer geek, yet his enthusiasm for computers is almost palpable.He first got on to the Internet in 1994 when he was at college He admits to being a "bit of an Internet addict".

We huddle in a box bedroom where Colin keeps his home computer. On the day I visit him the house is overflowing with relatives there to celebrate his sister's combined 21st birthday and engagement party. Half of the front bay window is taken up with a poster for the Church of England's new Alpha advertising campaign - Colin's mother is a lay preacher and training to be a priest. After going to college in Sheffield, where he studied information technology, he returned to the family home, a large semi near Europe's newest and biggest out-of- town shopping centre, Trafford Park in Lancashire He now works as a communications analyst. In Britain, with the occasional exception, this would simply be too expensive, without turning into a pay site, and the joy of British webcams at the moment is that they are largely free, largely amateur, and provide a fascinating and intriguing snapshot of a developing medium.Twenty-five-year-old Colin Surrey has been mad on computers since he was a teenager His first was a Sinclair Spectrum.