LESLIE MOONVES:
Thank you, guys. Thanks for behaving. They've always been way ahead of the curve. By the way, CBS is also investing in companies and Web sites that foster community, as in the case of the latest product from our next presenters. Two nights ago, the show, The L Word, premiered its fourth season on our premium cable network, Showtime. For those of you who haven't seen the show, it's about a very close-knit group of women.Here's a quick look at what you can expect to see in the new season.

(Video segment.)

Well, that should melt some TiVos.

We have just launched a new Web site, born right out of this show, called OurChart.com. This is one of the first examples of a media company taking its traditional assets and building an application around it for its online audience.
Here to describe what I mean are the creator and the star of The L Word, Ilene Chaiken, and Jennifer Beals.

ILENE CHAIKEN:
Leslie is talking about community, which is the explicit and motivating premise for our project.

JENNIFER BEALS:
Which is called Our Chart. It's a social networking site for gay women and their friends, inspired by a storyline on The L Word, but also, by the way, in which our show's viewers from the moment we debuted on Showtime swiftly and passionately anointed The L Word as the focal point for their community, claiming it as their own and congregating around it all over the country and all over the world, in clubs and house parties, and, of course, on the Internet.

(Video segment.)

ILENE CHAIKEN:
And those social networking sites are all the rage these days, everybody wants one, but as it happens, we're not just jumping on a bandwagon. This idea of community and interconnectivity has been our central thematic motif from the very beginning when in our pilot Alice demonstrated her theory of relationship connectivity.

JENNIFER BEALS:
Which she later evolved into a radio show on KCRW, LA's popular independent radio station, and eventually into an online site, much like the one we're about to show you.

(Video segment.)

ILENE CHAIKEN:
A classic case of life imitates art.

(Video segment.)

We looked at this story, and we went to our friends at Showtime and CBS and said, we really should do this, don't you think? It didn't take much convincing. Not only is the spending power of the gay market currently estimated at up to $641 million, gay consumers are more likely to use their credit cards for online purchases.

JENNIFER BEALS:
More importantly, our viewers want to tell us what they think about our show. They want to process with us, talk about their own relationships, talk to each other, and let us know how better we can reflect their community back to them, and model it for the rest of the world. And they want to tell Ilene how craven she is for breaking up my character, Bette's relationship with her girlfriend Tina. Ilene says she's going to listen when they talk to her on Our Chart.

ILENE CHAIKEN:
I'm going to put my ego aside, and with the help of Our Chart, I'm going to totally let the fans weigh in on the direction our L Word stories are taking.

In any event, the Internet is an ecosystem in which we all benefit from shared resources, shared enthusiasm and shared interests. The unique opportunity behind which CBS and Showtime are supporting us is in creating a new kind of social networking site, one that marries the rich, beautiful content of an established media venture with innovative, interactive user-generated content in what we think will be the ultimate online destination for this vibrant and engaged community.

JENNIFER BEALS:
This is the OurChart.com homepage.

ILENE CHAIKEN:
If you're a registered user, you log in. If not, you have the option to join and create a profile. I'm already logged in.
This control panel is like a portable console that lets you connect with your friends, nomatter where you are. Say I'm reading a blog post or watching a video, all I have to do is drop down my control panel and I can message anyone on my friend's list or even add friends without even leaving the page I'm on.

JENNIFER BEALS:
The L Word Insider offers our fans unprecedented access, podcasts from The L Words writers' room, behind the scenes exclusives, special deleted scenes.

ILENE CHAIKEN:
And most excitingly, original material from Jennifer, and our two other partners in this venture, Leisha Hailey and Katherine Moennig, like these beautiful black and white photographs Jennifer has been taking on and off set, from the very beginning of our show.

JENNIFER BEALS:
Here is our main blog called the Hookup, and our featured invitational guest bloggers, we call them Guestbians, because our site, just like our show, is not exclusive to lesbians. Everyone, gay, straight, or other, is invited to join in on our conversations, including all of you.

ILENE CHAIKEN:
Exactly. Our Chart members are the main thing. On our homepage we feature three items, Who's Who, Who's New, and an editor's selection of interesting items and discussions from personal pages called Off the Charts. And, of course, there's the Chart itself. Right now we're looking at My Chat, a visual representation of all my friends. We'll navigate to Leisha's chart from here, which moves her to the center and shows all of her connections.

We could actually navigate through the entire chart moving from friend to friend, provided everyone was actually connected, which I think is ultimately true. We can also use the chart to display info from my full profile. This is my actual profile page where I manage all of my personal information, friends, photos, videos. I wish we could show you more, but like in television production, there's never enough time to say everything you want to say.

JENNIFER BEALS:
The Our Chart social network is a logical extension of Alice's chart from The L Word, created expressly for the real life L world out there, so that, as Alice says on the show, we all can reach out from the alienation of modern life in order to make connections and form lasting relationships. We hope Our Chart fulfills that purpose for a large and growing community. Thank you.

LESLIE MOONVES:
Thanks, Jennifer and Ilene. It's truly exciting to think about the possibilities that our content opens up.

A word on Our Chart. It just launched, so go easy on it. It's in beta. I think media needs to get used to putting up content that is not quite complete, letting the audience fill it in