Cincinnati Bell was the first regional telephone company to enter the Internet access business, and this week, they'll make more history: putting the Olympic Torch live on the Internet.
As the torch is carried into Ohio over the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge Thursday, Cincinnati Bell will be pumping images from television news coverage into its special-purpose Web site (http://torchcam.fuse.net). The images will be updated continuously from 8-9:40 a.m.
The images will be provided by a WLWT-TV video crew, which will serve as the ''torchcam.'' They'll follow the runners as they run through Covington, across the Suspension Bridge and through Cincinnati to a ceremony in Sawyer's Point.
That night, the Torchcam will cover the festivities downtown. Cincinnati Bell will even have laptop computers at Sawyer Point so visitors can see what a live event looks like on an Internet site.
At 6:30 a.m. Friday, the Torchcam will be at Fountain Square as the Olympic torch leaves the city to head north to Wilmington and Columbus.
The torchcam will actually be a dozen cameras, and the images on the Web site will be taken from Channel 5's live TV coverage.
If you'd like to participate in this little bit of high-tech history, you should have a account from an Internet service provider, a fast modem and a copy of Netscape 1.1 or later. You might find the experience a little disappointing if you're hooking up to America Online or CompuServe at 14.4 kbps.
That's because the torch site will use an Internet technology called ''server push,'' which means the server (the Internet computer containing the Web site) will hold open the connection to your computer and ''push'' a new picture as soon as your computer receives the current picture. It's like watching a movie one frame at a time.
Chris Utley, Bell's webmaster, said a surfer with a clean 28.8 kbps connection will see 25-30 images a minute. Every three minutes, the page will reload for a new set of images.
There's nothing new about this technology; there are many sites on the Web that provide continuous pictures of useless places. You can look at beaches in Australia and Thailand, rooms at colleges, that sort of thing.
The most famous ''cam'' site is the Amazing Fish Cam (http://www.netscape.com/fishcam/fishcam.html), a continuously updated shot of a fish tank in the Netscape offices. (All you see these days is a white board telling you the fish are moving and will be back in June.)
Subscribers to Fuse.Net see server push in action when they load the home page (http://www.fuse.net) and watch that slow, cryptic ''Future insight, Unlimited information net, Simple access'' animation.
The torchcam site wasn't ready Friday, but a Bell spokesperson said the site will open Tuesday with the torch's route, a list of runners and the schedule of local torch events, and stories about Cincinnati's past Olympians.
Cincinnati's site is one of dozens about the Olympics and the torch's 15,000-mile trip from Los Angeles to Atlanta.
The official 1996 Summer Games site is found at http://www.atlanta.olympic.org where you can follow the torch route, plan your visit and order official Olympics hats and T-shirts. ESPN's SportsZone (http://ESPNET.SportsZone.com) and NBC (http://www.olympic.nbc.com/torch/) also have torch relay sites.
I don't know if any of these sites have tried to cover the relay live. Bell thinks that it's a first.
Well, at least it's a first for Cincinnati.
E-mail Charles Brewer with questions, comments and suggestions at cbrewer@enquirer.com.