Already the show’s online Forum is filled with new viewers asking questions designed to put veteran fans’ teeth on edge (why doesn’t he blink? what’s the deal with his pupils? is the show really, really going to end?). Well, yes it is, and Ze man already has meetings with the likes of Jeffrey Katzenberg under his belt.

“The one thing I took away from my meeting with Jeffrey Katzenberg is that the work begins now,” said Mr. Frank, who was accidentally rewarded with fame after a jokey video, “How to Dance Properly,” went utterly viral in 2001.

Apparently, Ze’s Hollywood agent discovered him via scobelizer.com, which seems every bit as Web2.0 as getting your start-up funded after a good write-up in TechCrunch or GigaOm.

And once Ze spent 10 days in Hollywood, taking meetings?

(Mr. Katzenberg advised him) “to stay kind of close to the system, but outside of it—to develop content, develop ideas, instead of trying to play to the game as it exists out there.”

Which apparently means – a movie? According to the Observer piece, yes.

Given that Ze tries to cap his show at around the two-minute mark, the idea of 90 minutes of brain-crack in one sitting seems perversely counter-intuitive. With Amanda Congdon taking the leap to ABC, the vlog-to mainstream path seems to run directly to television, and given the quick turn-around time of Ze’s online work, you’d think Ze could deliver a serious shot in the arm to MTV, Comedy Central or the Discovery Channel, to name a few of the more obvious outlets.

But it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that ‘the show with zefrank’ was a challenge to himself (could he do a show a day for a year?), and as much about the process as the end result (indeed, the process and the end result are inseperable).

You have to hope that Ze’s going to bring the same sensibility to the big screen as he does to that little window he lives in on my browser. The last person who immersed himself deeply in the process and came up big? Sasha Baron Cohen.

Zefrank the ying to Borat’s yang (ahem)? Probably not, but both share a lazer-beam focus on their subject matter, and an ability to marry the cerebral and the silly. If there is a ZeFrank feature film in the works, you have to hope it’s closer to Baron Cohen’s ultimate-outsider hijinks than it is to, say, Dane Cook in ‘Employee of the Month‘.

Meanwhile, given that my own online show once got me described on the ZeFrank Forum as the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Ze” (a backhanded compiment at best, but I’ll take it…) I can only hope that when Roger Corman or Troma Films are looking for the cheaper off-brand product, they know where to find me. It’s either that or the inevitable porno knock-off, right? (zehump with zespanks, maybe…)

Shauna (sorry Drew), Scriggity host and the “Queen of the Interwebs” (widely believed to be a self-annointed crown, but in fact the result of a three-way cage match with Melinda “Mrs. Bill” Gates and Tipper “parental guidance stickers” Gore).

Other shows may capture the high-energy, low-attention-span aesthetic that an all-juiced-up-on-RedBull and Firefox audience can twitch their way through. But (unlike Zefrank, Amanda Congdon or Joanne Colan) Shawna really is a MySpace profile pic come to life – simultaniously wide-eyed and snarky, having an assortment of “hair days” and riffing on reader mail in increasingly esoteric tangents.

Using reader mail rather than current events as a starting point (other than making me jealous, having painted myself into the current affairs corner) makes for a fresh show, and the further Shawna wanders off topic, the better (say, the “replacement” Dukes of Hazzard – Scriggity wasn’t fooled…).

We (OK, I) will be looking at spin-off show The Blender in a few weeks time, as it promises to be different each episode. What we have learned from the first episode is that equally in-your-lens host Clintus can chug a bottle of maple syrup, but not quickly enough to make him a yahoo. Nice try, Clintus.

But back to Scriggity (and, yes, the Blender too). If there’s a little too much “geeks talking to geeks, about geek stuff” in videoblogging (for me, and I may be in the minority here…), Scriggity feels like a show that belongs on the T-Mobile Sidekicks of the MySpace nation. That may not be the effect they’re going for (I’ll check… when they submit to an interview…) but I’d love to see Scriggity rule the YouTubiverse (ahem) as well as the Vlogosphere (is that 2 g’s?) As, I’m sure, would R&B legends Blackstreet, who never expected their work to live on in such a winning manner.

No Scriggity? Yes Scriggity, actually.

Amanda finally gets a few talking heads to ponder the possibility of being Person of the Year (a bald guy and a hairy guy happily co-existing – you can’t ask for much more than that). Then things take an odd left turn midway through a (somewhat sincere) interviewee’s discourse on YouTube and his touchy-feely feelings on personal communications. Amanda’s voice over informs us that perhaps it’s Time who took the left hand turn with their ‘You’ proclamation. That not everyone is part of this “you” that Time would like to define for us/you/erm, their readers.

It’s an interesting position to take, which is exactly what you’d hope for in the first episode of a high-profile new video show. But what, exactly does she mean by that? Those in the know will recognize some of the faces superimposed on the magazine cover. In as far as this is a media revolution, is Amanda saying that the credit belongs to the Politburo, not the people? Was the mention of YouTube just too much to take? Are the MySpace kids in? Or does their love of sparkly HTML over raw RSS disqualify them from being cover-stars for a magazine they’re not reading anyway?

Say it isn’t so, Amanda. And she did…

YouTubers, in my opinion, are independent media makers– so they fall into the “us” catagory. MySpace, as I believe Dave Winer once put it, is a blog on training wheels. I am not trying to say that they do not count. They do! They are part of all this as well!

I’m saying that many people are not in any way involved in internet culture. Those people are not at the forefront of this revolution, and therefore I don’t believe they should be “Person of the Year”… make sense?

Up to a point, yes. I’m glad to hear, from my “format agnostic” perspective, that Amanda’s not burning the un-Feedburned. At the same time, the cover in question (you know, shiny mirror, framed like a YouTube window, over a keyboard, and the legend ‘You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.’) doesn’t say, “unless you’re still sitting on the couch ordering 30 piece hunting knife sets from QVC on the weekends”. Nor does it really have to. We’re being a little over-literal here if we’re really asking for more precise demographics in Time’s own front-cover elevator pitch.

Now Amanda is a smart cookie squared. The square peg glamour-geek set to shake up and reshape the mainstream media’s round holes. She knows, I’m sure, that Time are making a broad-strokes, media-friendly statement, even as they repackaging a shift towards personal media in a way designed to, well, sell more copies of Time. Is Time attempting to make high-profile sense of the shifting media landslide (like a landscape only shiftier) all that different to ABC News adding a video blog (on training wheels?) fronted by, well, Amanda Congdon?

I’m still feeling a little like Amanda’s having her cake and eatting it here. Time’s take, however lurchingly big media, was broad enough to cover mash-ups as well as micro-journalism. I can’t imagine that Amanda really did treck across america just to red- and blue-state the country into those who have and have not heard of blogs (and in the comments on her own blog, she says that that’s not her intent).

“We the people” will be watching to find out what happens next.