• by Shankar Gupta , November 14, 2006

As MTV wraps up the season finale of "Laguna Beach," a reality drama about the hard-partying denizens of one of America's richest communities, the network will move the party online, where fans can watch a performance of the Laguna Beach local band Open Air Stereo and "meet" the show's stars.

After the show is aired Wednesday, the cast will go to the Laguna Beach Web site on MTV.com to answer questions from the audience and introduce the performance by Open Air Stereo, which will stream exclusively on the site.

Afterwards, the cast will appear for fans in the virtual world, Virtual Laguna Beach--a social network and graphical online chatroom, in the mold of games like Second Life, with 3D virtual recreations of "Laguna Beach" locales. The Web extras for the season finale will run without sponsors.

This Web extra is part of a continuing effort on the part of MTV to build out its broadband content, launching two new broadband channels in July and offering Web-only codas to its fall TV lineup. Although MTV's Web traffic lags behind other youth-focused sites it competes with, such as Facebook and MySpace, according to comScore, parent company Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman last week said that the company was on track to reach $500 million in annual digital advertising sales by the end of next year.