[sift this] The summer of 1982 was particularly bleak because the Best Friend left for England. With him, he took the only Apple ][ on the mountain which meant my crash course in BASIC and color graphics came to an abrupt halt. I searched relentlessly for a stand-in for my computer fixation and after a week, I found "As the World Turns" on CBS. Yes, in my pre-teen years, I became addicted to a soap opera.

Watching TV in the morning during the summers ended after the Price Is Right -- the last possible show that had marginal interest for a kid who would still sit through the Smurfs. The addiction developed primarily due to laziness -- I'd lay on the bed rather than get up to turn the TV off once Bob Barker had again reminded me to neuter my pets. So, I watched one day. I still remember the basic plot -- this guy and his girlfriend were being held in a castle from which they were trying to escape. Meanwhile, back in the home town, everyone was wondering where the guy and girl were PLUS this other older guy was sleeping with this lady who was just waiting for the right time to kill him. Juicy stuff.

By the end of summer, I knew all the characters by first name, the lovers had escaped the castle and the old guy was still sleeping around. School rescued me from the show, but the experience gave me a healthy respect for the addictive nature of soap operas. I use the story to explain one of the stranger successful businesses on the Internet: Web Episodic Entertainment.

The success of any idea is contingent upon hitting your audience with the "Interest Wave". Sure, Mosaic was a good windows browser, but there were minimal sites available. Netscape appeared just as the world was realizing the potential of and getting into creating decent and interesting content for the Web, so it became the de facto standard. The same goes for The Spot, one of the first Web based soap operas.

The original idea was this: Folks would come to The Spot to read the daily diaries of the occupants of a beach house a la Beverly Hills 90210. Avid readers could also e-mail these fictional occupants to comment on their cavorting and, thus, affect the next day�s, or next week�s plot. Ingenious. And it worked. The Spot quickly became one of the most traveled sites on the net and also one of the most imitated.

Trying to stay competitive, The Spot has embraced new technologies in an effort to create more bandwidth to their virtual actors. Running a room on the Palace, a channel on IRC, and maintaining a bulletin board has given viewers unprecedented access to The Spot characters, but such scrutiny does not come without cost. Suddenly, the characters must withstand a visual, verbal and written barrage of comments, criticism, and questions. The range of their responses as well as their portrayal of themselves in Quicktime videos, makes them seem, well, human.

Improvements in the amount of bandwidth between it�s viewers and actors will give The Spot the unique opportunity to help define the future of interactive entertainment, but they�ll need characters who will hold their own not matter what the media.