Anyone who's familiar with the Net knows that it's a vast, disorganized trashheap where half the information is either garbage or just plain wrong. You could spend all day--your whole life--wandering through its corridors aimlessly, hoping to stumble across something worthwhile, but you're an ambitious person with promotions to finagle and co-workers to blackmail. So where should you go first to discover everything the Net holds about your favorite hero, er, anti-hero, Jim Profit?
1. Search Engines: The first and most obvious place to go for any information is a search engine like Yahoo or Metacrawler. Keep a couple things in mind, though. You can't just tell Yahoo to search for "Profit" unless you want to spend all day sifting through websites on tax shelters and corporate progress reports. You have to think up something more unique--I chose "Profit" coupled with "Adrian Pasdar," but any of the names of the cast would do nicely. And don't forget the directors, writers, etc. (see below). If a search engine doesn't bring up what you're looking for, just try a different one.
2. The Internet Movie Database: Although technically a search engine, I'll give the IMDB a special mention. Within its cyberweb you can look up almost any movie, TV show, actor, or crewperson you can think of, and if they aren't there, you can add them yourself. You can even get the information delivered to you via e-mail. Of course, there are plenty of other TV & movie-specific search engines out there, too. For search purposes, I'll list Profit's major cast and crew, courtesy of IMDB:
3. Newsgroups: The best source of information I found was Deja News, a service that catalogs all postings to any newsgroup you can think of and is able to sort through them by subject, author, date, anything you like. You can do a search for "Profit" and "Adrian Pasdar" and read all those messages, and if you find a conversation that intrigues you or seems promising, it only takes a click to follow it. Plus, you'll have access to the e-mail addresses of people who seem to be fans of the show. Deja News will also post messages for you so you can send notice to the world about who you are and what you're looking for. The newsgroup "rec.arts.tv" was particularly useful in my search; others that cater specifically to video-tape trading should also be helpful. Just remember to select the "Old" database from the "Search Filter," though--most of the messages you'll want are from around April of 1996.
4. Online Trading Pages: Believe it or not, there are quite a few video-trading websites in operation that act like privately-owned newsgroups: you can post a message detailing your video wants & hope that a resourceful recording nut spots it.
5. Explore & Observe: The most important thing to remember when searching for anything on the Web is that the best things are usually hidden in the most unlikely places. If all the major keywords pan out, just dig a little deeper--if the computer says Morty's Homepage has the words "Profit" and "Adrian Pasdar" on it, go ahead and check it out. It could be a goof, it could be an "...and I hated that stupid show...", or it could be that Morty was the caterer's assistant on the shoot and walked away with a dozen commercial-quality cassettes of the episodes. E-mail is cheap, fast, and easy, so it never hurts to ask.
Oh, and one more thing. If you've searched and searched and you're getting disheartened by all the cheap, poorly done tripe out there, why not add to it? Er, correct the problem yourself? Find out if you have any free webspace coming to you from your Internet provider, download a free & easy HTML Editor, and paste up your own website devoted to Profit. The content possibilities are endless--fanfiction, pictures, episode guides (with personalized commentary, of course), drinking games, artwork, trivia, the "Spin the Computer Mouse of Death" game, whatever. And then be sure to tell me so I can link up. ;)