First, the bad-news — “Lost” is still not coming back until February 2008.

Now the good news — The producers feel our pain and are working to make sure that new content will be available to fans during the long hiatus.

Producers Dameon Lindelof and Carleton Cuse announced this week that mobisodes of the popular series will broadcast via the Internet and cell phones during the show’s hiatus. These short, 90-second episodes will have clues for die-hard fans of the show about some of the big mysteries the show has put forth in its three years on the air. But more importantly, the mobisodes will keep the show on the public’s radar during the long hiatus.

The producers have wanted to do these mobisodes for several years now, according to the Hollywood Reporter. But, they were waiting to make sure they had the actors signed on for the mobisodes before they moved forward with them.

“Nobody wanted to see two people sitting on a beach that we’ve never heard of talking and saying, ‘Hey, did you hear what Jack and Kate did today?’ You want to see Jack and Kate. It’s taken us three years to get those deals in place,” Lindelof said.

The producers also plan to keep the show firmly in the minds of fans and the media by attending this year’s Comicon in San Diego. There they will offer up a panel discussion on the show’s mind-bending third-season and game-changing season finale as well as offer hints as to the future of the show. (Biggest question: will the flashes be flash-forwards now instead of just flashbacks?)

Lindelof and Cuse also say they’re beginning to work out the end-point of the hit series. ABC renewed the show for three more seasons of 16-episodes each. Each season will air in a block from February to May.

“Obviously, we can’t wait to the 48th hour to say, ‘Here are all the mysteries of the show,’ ” Lindelof said. But Cuse also noted the reality of the sometimes vociferous and heavily engaged viewership of the show, which uses the Web to advance theories and post explanations and even freeze-frames to parse further meaning.

Cuse and Lindelof are also very aware of the furor surrounding another long-running, serialized drama that bowed out to a great deal of scrutiny and debate earlier this week.

“We will not be ending with a blackout,” said Cuse.

“I’m not sure there is any ending that will satisfy everyone,” Cuse said. “Our hope is that the ending will be … the logical conclusion of the story.”

The producers acknowledged that being showrunners today is very different from how it was a decade ago.

You have to be more of a brand manager,” he said. He said there are 37 ancillary parts to the “Lost” brand from T-shirts to mobile phone applications to a planned video game.

The duo also discussed what are perceived as mis-steps the show has made–not only on the series itself, but also in the tie-in markets. Last summer, a novel “Bad Twin” hit the bookstore shelves after Sawyer was seen on-screen, reading a manuscript of it. The novel was by a mysterious author who died in the first few episodes of the show. The manuscript was found and published post-humously, according to the novel’s introduction. It was rumored for a time the novel was ghost-written by popular author and self-professed “Lost” fan Stephen King. However, upon reading it, it’s obvious that King did not write the novel.

The novel was a noir-mystery that was intended to tie into the series’ themes, including the fact that not everyone is exactly what he or she seems upon first glance. There were some minor tie-ins to the show, such as a trip to Australia and the appearance of the fast-food chain Hurley worked for. But beyond that, there was little value to the novel–either as a tie-in to the show or from a literary standpoint.

The producers also said that they made a misstep this year with Niki and Paulo, two new characters who showed up on the island and were supposed to be part of the original survivors of crash. Cuse and Lindelof said they realized before the public outcry that they’d made a mistake by including them and hastily wrote them out of the show.

“We buried them alive,” Cuse said of Nikki and Paulo. “OK, you guys don’t like Nikki and Paulo, there.”

The first two seasons of “Lost” are out on DVD for purchase or rental from Netflix (or other on-line rental services). The third season hits store shelves later this summer. If you’ve not caught this great show, this is a perfect time to get caught up and see why it is one of the best shows on TV.