The Register-Guard reports on an innovative twist on the ways online fan communities provide social support for one another. One of the Ze Frank fans in his online community needed a ride cross country. Now:

Instead of holding up a cardboard sign along some busy freeway, Vaughn is getting rides from fellow members of an online community centered on a vlog (video Web log) known as “The Show with Ze Frank“. He’s known as “RunningFool” or “HumanBaton,” the names given him on the Web pages that track his progress.

It started as a lark, a simple Internet request for a ride to Southern California for winter break. But it morphed, as things have a tendency to do on the Web, into something much different: a cross-country challenge in which fans of “The Show,” inexplicably known as Sports Racers and partial to rubber duckies, offer to pick him up at one location and drop him off at another, where he is picked up by the next volunteer link in the coast-to-coast chain.

Ze Frank, as I’ve written before, has a real knack for generating user participation, so I’m not surprised to see this emerge amongst his fans. Cool stuff.