It's All Happening at the Zoo
Check out the Penguin Cam, live images of penguins living in the Edge of the Icepack exhibit in New York's Central Park Zoo.

You can watch the elephants at the National Zoological Park in Washington with the ElephantCam.

Polar bears are at the top of the Arctic food chain. Meet some polar bears at the Toledo Zoo in Ohio with the Polar Bear Cam.

The Places You'll Go
Webcams offer opportunities to see things and places you might never otherwise get to see. Parks, tourist attractions, both in the United States and around the world, are some of the most popular webcams.

There are many webcams trained on the world's active volcanoes. From Mt. St. Helens in Washington State to the Santorini caldera in Greece and Mt. Fuji in Japan, webcams offer viewers an opportunity to see live pictures of volcanoes before and during an eruption.

Perhaps you haven't had the opportunity to visit the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. But you can visit a webcam to watch the Old Faithful Geyser erupt. One of Yellowstone's 10,000 geothermal features, Old Faithful erupts frequently. The webcam posts predicted eruption times and updates its real-time photos every 30 seconds.

For a more interactive experience, visit the Tundra-Cam. This webcam is located in Colorado's Front Range mountains, along the Continental Divide. Located above the timberline at an elevation of 11,600 feet, the webcam is used for research into and education about the alpine tundra. Visitors can control the webcam in real time, panning and zooming to view snow-melt patterns, mountain geomorphology, and changes in vegetation.

If you are more in the mood to see the world, there are also webcams that let you view the Eiffel Tower in Paris, London's Big Ben, and look out over Niagara Falls. But to really see the entire world, you can visit Planet Cam. This webcam provides live images from the SeaWiFS (Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor) satellite. The images use different colors to indicate water versus plants or plankton, and can be used to monitor urban sprawl.

More Links
For a more complete list of links to volcano webcams, visit Volcano Live!

ABCNews.com provides a list of webcams around the globe as part of their "All the World's on the Web" series.

Growing and Glowing
If the Internet is a window on the world, the webcam is a zoom lens, allowing a viewer to focus in on places of interest. Sometimes those places are weird, unusual, or perhaps places that you had never even considered before, nevermind considered interesting.

Take the Corn Cam, for example. Iowa Farmer Today hosts this webcam showing live pictures of a typical Iowa corn field. Compare the before and after photos showing the field when it was planted on May 3 and now when the corn has grown to over two feet tall. The accompanying journal describes how the corn has started growing faster with the warming temperatures and how the plants have survived late May's heavy rains. Iowa Farmer Today also hosts a Soybean Cam and a Dairy Cam, which show activity in an Iowa dairy farm's milking parlor.

Not unusual? How about the Ghostcam, based in Llancaiach Fawr Manor in South Wales? The house is from the 16th century, abandoned, and supposedly full of ghosts. Those who know — or claim to — say that every room in the house has a spooky story. The Ghostcam is moved from room-to-room during the day and left on at night. Anyone spotting anything strange, be it shadow or ghost, is asked to describe it on the Web site. If you don't find something eerie there, try the ghost at England's Ordsall Hall.

If you want to try finding something during daylight hours, perhaps you should visit Nessie on the Net, a webcam overlooking Scotland's famous Loch Ness. With two cameras and plans for a third, underwater camera, this site offers viewers a chance to look for, zoom in on, and perhaps take an online "snapshot" of the Loch Ness Monster.

Where once webcams were a novelty, today there are tens of thousands of webcams — a number representing an explosive growth in both the Internet and people's comfort with the technology. Now you can find webcams following rush hour traffic and planes at Boston's airport. Parents watch their toddlers via webcams in daycare centers. With purposes ranging from the practical to the silly, from useful to self-absorbed, webcams are a certified phenomenon. They are eyes on the world, even if the view is only several inches square.