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W ebcams on the dashboards of big trucks are nothing new; my first day on the job with three years ago I had a long conversation with a source about his own, which he used to transmit his view of the road back to his wife at home. She'd always know when he was A-OK. For even longer, photog-raphy has been a pastime of many haulers. ' Flickr group () is growing every day, and the great shots there stand as plenty evidence. But no driver I know has taken both practices quite as far toward a community-building art form as 44-year-old Stephen Michaels, pro-prietor of the site. Michaels began his photographic pursuit when he was knee-high to a frog, as he puts it. I've always been fascinated by cameras. Grow-ing up mostly in San Antonio, Texas, in a military family of slightly less-than-average income, though, he didn't have early access to the kind of money to allow him to really pur-sue printing and developing with high-dollar cameras and dark room facilities. Michaels made do with what he could scrape together. I built my first camera out of an old oatmeal canister by fash-ioning a pinhole projecting onto 5-by-7-inch pieces of photographic paper, he says. With the lights out, I'd hide in the bathroom, put the paper in the canister and hold my finger over the pinhole until he got to whatever he wanted to shoot. Ex-perimenting with exposure times and developing the photo paper in the bathtub in the dark got him a long way toward learning the pho-tographic art. is his second go at a website, and it looks like this one's going to stick. It began on the model of the former , creation of meteorologist and Earthweek syndicated news-paper columnist Steve Newman, then a trucker, which chronicled his view of American highways via an old-style streaming camera that refreshed pictures every few sec-onds. Newman, in turn, credits the proprietor of , a written and photographic truck-ing blog, for inspiring him. I think it's cool that Steve picked up the mantle from where I left off, New-man says, and I picked it up myself from elsewhere. Michaels' site builds on that idea by archiving galleries of profession-al-quality photos from locales the nation over and, 24 hours a day, streaming live video from the dash via the service. Michaels first broadcasted 24/7 on May 20, 2008, and since then has built a large community of fans and contributors. Several local news sta-tions have covered him, and he was even picked up by popular Brazilian Sunday night show close to the end of August last year, Mi-chaels says. The exposure shut down his webcam. I remember I was sit-ting there and pulled my own cam-era up and it said `offline' come to find out we had 5,000 hits in under two hours. then ran a front-page story on him and brought 57,000 users to his site in two days, he says. We've exploded from there. Note the plural subject of that statement. Though Michaels is the sole driving force behind the large majority of photographic content on the site, its importance in his life and the world lies in its use for others. We're not just another trucking website, he says. The webcam is a trucking camera, but it's about travel, adven-ture and the trucking world. It at-tracts and retains one of the most diverse groups of people on the In-ternet. I never intended it that way, but it just grew and I just kind of went with the flow of it. (For more on the lives Michael has touched, see The Road Crew, p. 42.) Live From Somewhere Reefer driver Stephen Michaels makes impact with big-rig webcam and photo site exit only todd dills Truckers News Senior Editor Todd Dills is the author of a novel, , and blogs daily at channel19.blogspot. . Write him at or http://twitter.com/ . Join Us in Data Mining The Associated Press May 13 added a cap to a round of local news stories detailing the difficulties for drivers and owner-operators far and wide in this economy with a story about broader forecasting as it relates to, yes, trucking. You don't even really need to read it, I imagine, to get the gist: The more trucks are rolling, the better we're doing. According to the AP, news didn't bode well for a recovery any time soon, but some analysts were suspecting we may be close to the bottom. And so a proposal: For haulers on regular or dedicated runs, I challenge you to count the number of tractor-trailers you see going the opposite way on any particular 10-mile segment on a run you do regularly. Note the mile markers, the number of trucks that pass, time of day and date and do it again when you roll that way next. Send the final results my way, and I'll publish them after you've gotten up to 10 or more runs over time. I've been doing the same on a stretch of interstate I regularly run. Call it the Channel 19 Counting Method of Real-Time Economic Analysis, perhaps. After all the bad news, talk of hitting the very bottom has the notion of a turnaround rising to the surface. I suspect we'll see growing numbers in our counting over time, and at the least, like a kid's cow-counting on a family road trip, it'll be a good 10-min. respite from the radio news for those who need it. Stay safe. posteD July 2009 94 trUcKers news