Online sites aim to be TV Guide for the Web

You've seen Will Ferrell's "Landlady." You know what Hulu is. But that much hyped 21st century invention called the Web series remains largely unknown to you.

Fear not.

A host of websites can direct you to the best series online, including Tilzy.tv and Tubefilter.tv -- both good blogs that feature knowledgeable seekers of worthy Web series.

It's a thriving business. The broader online video guide OVGuide.com, founded in 2006, earlier this month announced it had received $5 million from venture capital firm Baroda Ventures after the site's first month of profitability in January.

The site eGuiders.com began last week, touting itself as the "TV Guide of the Web." The way it distinguishes itself is primarily through its Hollywood guest editors. Among them: Damon Lindelof, co-creator of "Lost"; Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara; actor Willie Garson ("Sex and the City"); and Shawn Ryan, the executive producer of "The Shield."

It's a similar approach of recommendations from well-known personalities like you see on Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's FunnyOrDie.com -- albeit with a wider purview.

The site was founded by Marc Ostrick, who has done Web series for TV shows such as Fox's "24" and HBO's "John From Cincinnati," and his partner Evangeline Morphos, a theater professor at Columbia University.

After Ostrick mentioned the difficulty he had both distributing video content and finding it online, Morphos noted that TV had had a similar period of programming confusion before the birth of TV Guide in 1953 -- which pooled the resources of several earlier regional guides.

"The greatest problem with content on the Internet is people have a hard time knowing where to go to find it," says Ostrick. "There's just so much stuff out there."

David Milch, the creator of "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood," is a principal adviser to eGuiders.

Ostrick and Milch collaborated on a Web component for Milch's "John From Cincinnati," the confusing drama that was canceled after one season. Ostrick says -- and this may further confuse fans -- that the show was ultimately about the Internet and whether it might be possible to humanize the Internet.

Milch has said eGuiders is "a good start" toward this goal.