Don’t be fooled by the name. Canadian Actor Online may have been created with Canuck thespians in mind, but it has quickly evolved into one of the most comprehensive Web-based Canadian production resources around.

The brainchild of actor/author Lynda Mason Green and freelance writer Paul Lima, Canadian Actor (//www.canadianactor.com/) is set up as a portal with more than 600 links to sites with information on the film, television and theatre industries.

‘Almost anything that has to do with the business, we’re trying to get attached in a link to the site,’ says Green, a 25-year acting veteran whose series work includes War of the Worlds and Night Heat.

Green originally solicited Lima’s help in creating a Web page for her book Standing Naked in the Wings: Anecdotes from Canadian Actors, co-authored by Tedde Moore. ‘When we were doing the book, we were very much inspired by how much of a community there is [among actors] even though people are distributed across the country,’ says Green.

A website, they decided, would be an excellent way to facilitate such a widespread community.

While actors were foremost in their minds, Green and Lima created the site rich with links to just about any area you might want, including professional associations, tv and film production houses, and screenwriting resources. The list also includes links to film and tv services such as animation, special effects, distribution, post-production, lighting and laser effects, and equity listings for directors.

There are also a number of links to resources in the u.s. and around the world, including the American Film Institute, Writers Guild of America and British Kinematograph Sound and Television Society.

‘We’ve also put up information on government agencies and funding resources. That’s the kind of information that can take you days or weeks to find. Now you can go directly to the source,’ says Lima, Canadian Actor’s webmaster.

‘Instead of going to a search engine and finding one or two, we’ve done all the searching, we’ve done all the categorizing and organizing.’

Lima, who works as a professional journalist by day, also updates the site’s ‘Breaking News’ section. ‘We try to have a lot of original content,’ he says, ‘news relating to Canadian actors and the film, television, theatre industry.’ There are, however, limitations to what one person can do maintaining an entire website and keeping up on the day’s breaking news stories. As a result, the same news story might end up leading the site for several days.

Still, the costs and time involved in building the site are surprisingly low. Lima and Green began brainstorming in June and a version of the site was up by July. The site already saw 2,000 hits between Aug. 1 and Sept. 1, and Lima projects 10,000 to 15,000 hits for the same period next year.

To finance the site, Lima set up affiliate programs with Chapters and Amazon.com, which links users to the book retailer in exchange for a 5% to 15% commission on any book purchases. Links are set up to books on every subject from acting and auditioning, to screenwriting and tv production.

Registration of the url costs $100 and Lima pays $50 per year to an isp. To upgrade the site with video and more interactive elements would cost them $35 per month.

In Green’s mind, such an upgrade would see the site offer users ‘an ongoing topical exchange of ideas and opinions…something more like a forum,’ she says.

‘We’ve only just scratched the surface of it. We have all kinds of ideas about what we want to do in the future.’

As for Green, she’s already on to her next project.

And what does an actor – who’s starred in movies and tv, published a book on actors and created a website for actors do for an encore? Well, she’s begun working on a documentary. Its tentative title? Actor.