During the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, many desperate fans of genre television turn to the web for updates on where the story-lines for Heroes or Lost are headed -- or might be headed if and when the strike ends. Those TV enthusiasts can choose from ay number of online fan sites, but the best sources of insider news and predictions come from blogs maintained by a given show's top producers and writers.

For example, as reported here by Jenna Wortham, a Battlestar Galactica-related blog written by series executive producer Ronald D. Moore discusses Moore's work, his thoughts on the strike, the status of his show, etc. Moore manages to steer clear from discussing the creative aspects of BSG in any detail -- a sensible move if you consider he could violate strike rules if he did.

According to Jonathan Handel, entertainment attorney, "A TV show's fictional blog is just 'an extension of the same show,' and the writing (by a WGA member) is therefore prohibited."

Blog Cabin is DIY Network's newest hit series, featuring popular expert hosts who pitch in to bring the Kinzel Springs retreat to life. Watch us build the cabin one blog at a time, then enter daily for a chance to win it!

From February until early April, 2007, DIY Network.com invited visitors to vote each day on 13 design areas for a future cabin to be built in the Great Smoky Mountains. Thousands decided on such areas as the floor plan, roof, countertops, even the front door. The results are here, and so are the build projects.

What program viewers see is a structure designed, discussed and even tweaked by Internet bloggers. Thirteen parts of the building, from floor plan to front door, were voted on and blogged about on the channel's companion Web site, www.DIYnetwork.com, from February to early April this year.

The Web site's blog cabin section has had more than 2 million page views since February. More than 2,800 blog comments were posted and 4.2 million votes cast to select the cabin features.

"I was surprised by the sheer numbers, frankly," says Freddy James, DIY vice president for programming. "It's amazing how much having creative input in a home-building project really resonates with people."

Mr. Nakagawa's simple Web site has become the center of the "LOLcats" phenomenon, a booming online subculture built around digital images and deliberately bad grammar. There's not much to it: Take a digital photo -- often one of household pets, particularly cats -- and purposefully place misspelled text on top. Anyone with elementary skills in Adobe's Photoshop or Microsoft's Paint software can make their own.

Nearly nine months after launching icanhascheezburger.com, Mr. Nakagawa's site receives around 200,000 unique visitors and a half-million page views each day, according to Mr. Nakagawa.

Visitors can browse a sprawling gallery of lolcats, vote for their favorites and post comments. Mr. Nakagawa says he receives up to 500 submissions a day, thanks in no small part to his site's tool that helps people build their own. He says every entry is screened for merit and originality before earning inclusion.

Only 12 or so submissions make the gallery a day. "It's ridiculous," Mr. Nakagawa admits, "but we do go through all of them." He certainly has the time. Revenue from ads on the site is "more than enough to pay my bills."

He saw traffic on the blog, I Can Has Cheezburger, which he runs with his partner, "Tofuburger" [she refuses to disclose her real name] double each month: 375,000 hits in March, 750,000 in April, 1.5 million in May. Cheezburger now gets 500,000 page views a day from between 100,000 and 200,000 unique visitors, according to Nakagawa. The cheapest ad costs $500 for a week. The most expensive goes for nearly $4,000. Nakagawa, an accidental entrepreneur who saw his successful business materialize out of the ether, quit his programming job at the end of May: "It made more sense to do this and see how big it could get."

Cheezburger's story is unusual in the upper reaches of the blogosphere in that the time between launching and reaching a critical mass of readers who sustain the site is so compressed. But many of the most popular bloggers have similar tales of starting out with a niche idea -- an inside joke, a particular obsession -- and watching it explode. Of course, most blogs linger in obscurity and are read by only a handful of people, and few ever reach the level Cheezburger has. What about a blog like Cheezburger lets it break away from the pack?

The initial appeal of the blog may have been a fluke, but its growth since then has been part of a tightly controlled experiment to help answer that question. Nakagawa and his partner constantly tweak the site to see what draws readers and what leaves them cold.

"We basically have a playground where people keep coming to play, so we're trying to create new games all the time,"Nakagawa says.

Oh great. Just what the world needs. Another lame-ass corporate-owned movie blog that doesn't know a freakin' thing about ... just kidding! We're actually quite happy to share the news that MTV Movies is now offering a brand spankin' new movie blog. Or at least I'm happy about it, and here's why: I'm a big fan of MTV's movie coverage. For the last year or so, they've done some really solid stuff. Aside from the clunky interface and long load times at the website, those guys do a damn good job with the scoops, the news and some consistently excellent interviews. So it's not like a "new" blog as much as it is an upgrade. A much more aesthetically pleasing and bandwidth-friendly upgrade.

Welcome to the MTV Movies Blog, updated throughout the day with exclusive movie news, trailers, interviews and more. Our team of film experts joins with celebrity contributors - from Eli Roth to Judd Apatow - to ensure that when it comes to the hottest flicks, you'll hear it first.

What happened to my Plog?
The program that was Plogs has made way for the new and improved Amazon Daily. Your feedback and investment in Plogs has helped shape this new program. We hope you enjoy Daily as much as you did Plogs! Any authors you had subscribed to from Plogs have been transferred over to your Amazon Daily, as well as reminders and activity from friends.

Amazon Daily is a blog-short for "web log"-that contains posts by editors from all over the company. Whether you're a die-hard fiction lover, a gadget geek, an avid collector of classic films or just a fan of what we sell, you'll find all sorts of entries that will interest you. Amazon Daily's home page contains all editorial posts (sorted so the most recent entries appear at the top); in the sidebar, they're sorted by topic, so you can browse one concept at a time instead of taking all of it in at once! Each post gives you the opportunity to provide private feedback to the editor as well as leave public comments for other customers to see.

How can I interact with Amazon Daily?
At the bottom of each post you will find an assortment of things you can do once you have read that post. The first is vote whether or not you liked that post, which will give you the option to leave feedback. You can also leave public comments on that post. You will also see an options menu, which has many interesting features. As more interactive features for each post are introduced they will be added into the options menu.

SYLVESTER STALLONE: I do. [LAUGHS] I, you know, the other day I, I usually paint characters or situations that are, you know, kind of emotional... bizarre. But lately I've been painting, dare I say it, flowers for the house. But they're bizarre flowers.

I made by bed, and I sleep like a baby,
With no regrets and I don't mind saying,
It's a sad sad story
That a mother will teach her daughter
that she ought to hate a perfect stranger.
And how in the world
Can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they'd write me a letter
Saying that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

The bottom line is this: if you want to be the next J.J. Abrams, Aaron Sorkin or Tim Kring, you better brush up on your blogging skills. Because it's not enough to write a hit show anymore. You have to interact with fans online, liveblog events and be ready with the pithy (yet not too revealing) commentary. Writing for tv sure isn't what it used to be.

I think there is a shorthand to compare it to X-men when you have not yet seen the show. However, my guess is that that comparison will go away once you have seen what we are doing.

Yes it worries me. There is only so much time commitment that an audience has for this kind of show. However, the only honest answer that I can give to this questions is that I have to hope and believe that Heroes will be one of the few that really hits for the audience. I think we are different enough in both premise and execution to stand out from the pack.

Hi my Dear fans and friends alike,
I have decided to not return to Saturday Night Live this season. I wish the best to everyone at the show and expect them to have a great season. It's been a wonderful eight years and I am grateful for all the friends I was able to make and all the great people I had the pleasure of working with. I want to give a big thank you to all my fans for your kind comments and well wishes. I look forward to making you laugh in the future, and hopefully not behind the counter at Burger King. Goodnight my dears!
XO,
H

After successful trials last year, programs are increasing their blogs' roles in the new season. CBS is setting up a MySpace page for Mother, with separate pages for the various characters to blog.

The Office's Dwight Schrute's blog on nbc.com has been read by over 1,000,000 different viewers since it launched last fall, with 2 million-3 million page views. Fulfilling NBC boss Jeff Zucker's "TV 360" mandate, the comedy is expanding its Web presence on MySpace, with blog entries from several characters.

And based on the popularity of its blogs, a book called Grey's Anatomy: Notes From the Nurse's Station and Overheard at the Emerald City Bar, compiling Debbie's and Joe's blog entries, hits stores Sept. 12. It's published by ABC corporate sibling Hyperion.

For many programs, the blogs fill a mandate from the network to increase their online offerings. Chris Van Dusen, assistant to Grey's creator Shonda Rhimes, says Rhimes challenged the staff to come up with compelling ways to promote the show online, and he suggested a blog for the bartender who pours drinks for off-duty doctors and nurses from Seattle Grace Hospital.

"The idea was to blog what happens in between the episodes," says Van Dusen, who writes the Emerald City Bar blog. "It's what [the characters] talk about when they come to the bar."

Just 19 years old when he became a viral video sensation, Brolsma waited months to tell his mother what was going on. Suzanne Brolsma learned of her son's new fame when she came home from work one afternoon to find the phone ringing and her answering machine full of messages from members of the press. The media attention was overwhelming and despite the immense popularity of the video, the Brolsma family never made a cent from Gary's fame. Like many lower-income American families, the Brolsmas struggle daily to make ends meet.

But while Brolsma may have found the press attention daunting, it was the enthusiasm, encouragement and affection of his fellow Internet users that inspired him to return with a new video. "I heard from so many people asking when I would do another video," says Brolsma. "If people can watch this new video, enjoy it and get a laugh out of it, then I'm happy with that."

MuggleCast is doing well. While many podcasts earn almost nothing, Demopoulos said, MuggleCast earns revenue. It makes money through T-shirt sales, after a printing group out of Georgia saw how well the podcast was doing and offered to design T-shirts for the show for free. Now, the hosts get $6 on each $15 shirt sold.

The site also garners about $750 a month from reading advertisements for GoDaddy.com, an Internet domain-name broker. Sims and Schoen also earn $800 a month for maintaining the site.

Visibility is high, too. Last month, the show was No. 3 on the Apple iTunes top-100 list of "Arts" podcasts. And it's enjoying an overall rank of 46th out of tens of thousands on the same site.

Podcast Alley, a directory of podcasts nationwide, ranked it No. 2 on its top-10 list. The show also has been nominated for the Nickelodeon Australia's 2006 Kids' Choice Awards, and is a nominee for the 2006 Podcast Awards People's Choice Award.

Joining Lander and Farabee in this endeavor are Nick Budd and David Martindale. Martindale also serves as lead designer and technician for the new site. All four writers work at Dragon's Lair Comics in Round Rock, Texas.

Comic Pants is anchored by "Wednesday Number Ones", a weekly feature updating every Wednesday morning that will provide commentary on every first issue coming to comic shops that day. In addition, the site will feature regularly updated reviews from all four contributors, Lander's popular Previews forecast column "Down the Line" and more.

Comic Pants is a serious review site with a sense of humor, as indicated by the unusual name, which was suggested by Dave Farabee during a brainstorming session.