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Ze Frank, on the phone from New York, tells me that he was briefly tempted not to end his madly popular online show last weekend, exactly one year after it started airing every weekday. The time limit had been part of the plan from the beginning; the mad popularity was something else.

"It really was this wild ride," says Frank. "I've been working with highly engaged audiences for five or six years now, and I've never seen anything like this."

Five days a week, every week since last March, he wrote and produced a new video episode of The Show, a manic, groundbreaking production that attracted legions of loyal fans and enmeshed them in the creative process like few had done before. Now, 250 shows later, it's over, and from the pining heard around the Web, you'd think Buffy had ended again. (You can still watch all the episodes at zefrank.com/theshow.)

The Show defied genre as much as it did convention. You could call it a video diary, assuming the video diary belonged (which it did) to an artist, programmer, teacher, musician and connoisseur of poop jokes who holds a degree in neurology -- and one who was willing to put six hours a day into writing and producing each entry to professional standards.

Thirty-four-year-old Ze Frank -- that's pronounced "Zay," as in "Hosea," his birth name -- has been an Internet fixture since 2001, when a birthday invitation he made, featuring clips of himself performing a variety of silly dances, became a viral phenomenon. Since then, he built his website (zefrank.com) into a playground for interactive Internet projects, while exploring these ideas as a speaker, university instructor and consultant. Curious to see if his ideas about online video held water, he enrolled himself in improv classes, and started The Show as a year-long experiment.

There was no set format, other than Frank's ever-present face mugging for the camera. Often, he would riff on the day's news, with a special fondness for skewering the Bush administration and tittering over space news that sounds dirty (you know, the sort that orbits Uranus). There were travelogues from around the world, the occasional original song, endless one-liners and earnest monologues on everything from Scrabble to the nature of creative thought.

And then there was the audience, its fabled audience. Frank dubbed his fans "Sports Racers," a non-sequitur in-joke. In fact, every show was packed with non-sequitur in-jokes, the kind that dissuade new viewers but reward the ones who got it. As the weeks passed, the dozens of daily responses the show garnered became a hundred, then hundreds, then thousands. Eventually, the show became as much about its fans as anything else.

It started with simple challenges -- asking viewers to dress up their vacuum cleaners, and being deluged with e-mailed photos of dolled-up Hoovers. Later, Frank famously asked his fans to place two pieces of bread on two opposite points of the globe, creating an "Earth sandwich." He had his Sports Racers collaboratively script entire episodes on a wiki page, which he then faithfully performed. He played, and lost, a game of chess against the combined wisdom of his fan base, announcing his moves one at a time in his videos.

Throughout, his fans sent in videos of themselves -- climbers on mountaintops, dance troupes on stages -- which he used as daily introductions to the show. Frank's consummate goofiness created a kind of safe play space, where his viewers could respond in kind. People who sent in videos of their martial-arts "power moves" were awarded names like "Randy Puma," and maybe even inducted into Frank's League of Awesomeness.

And eventually, communicating on the forums he'd built for them, Frank's fans started oddball projects of their own initiative, like the Human Baton (http://www.humanbaton.com) -- a 22-year-old student who is attempting to cross the United States by being handed off from one Ze Frank fan's care to the next. The community he'd built had taken on a life of its own.

"In a lot of the community spaces, I was an outsider," says Frank. "I could post in the forum, and people wouldn't respond to me." Not that there was any lack of love between Frank and his audience. The sadness among fans after The Show's melancholic conclusion last week was palpable.

But stop he did. Even though money was coming in, the stress of single-handed daily production was wearying, and the in-jokes that helped gel his fan base were getting onerous. Opening the show to a wider audience would have meant retooling it anyway. Moreover, Frank says he's savouring the chance for reflection that an ending brings.

Most refreshingly of all, for a man who just ended a new-media experiment on a high note, he's not interested in forecasting what's to come in online video (or even personally -- he's moving on to projects that he pointedly can't talk about). He's even less interested in declaring that he has somehow changed the world. The waves of technological change float people, fortunes and phenomena like The Show, but he didn't make the waves.

"You have people bobbing up and down on the waves, and when they get to the top of the wave, they shout, "I made this!" he says.

The people he admires aren't the ones who pretend they created the waves, but the ones who realize that the wave of change is beyond their control, and decide to play in it.

"Surfing is giving a human purpose to a wave. It's doing tricks, and exploring the contours of it . . . it's an explorer's urge."

And so, for Ze Frank, the show goes on.

webseven@globeandmail.com