I wrote this puzzle for Microsoft Intern PuzzleDay 2003, whose theme was reality TV. In fact, it was the second puzzle I wrote after joining the Microsoft puzzle community.
I'm not particularly fond of this puzzle because it doesn't have a "fun step". It took me a while to discover that some things, like decoding and Internet search, aren't really fun and so aren't suited to be the main step of a puzzle. Nowadays I only use decoding as an answer extraction step, and I try to avoid even that.