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A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes --- Bowie loves MP3 - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is the Y2K crisis overblown? Separate the hype from reality in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk ___________________ Search barnesandnoble.com for great technology book bargains ___________________ R E C E N T L Y The telephone toll By David Brake For European Net users saddled with high phone rates, the meter is always running (01/18/99) Card bards By Robert Rossney Legend of the Five Rings isn't just a card game -- it's a whole new kind of storytelling (01/15/99) The 21st Challenge No. 17 Results By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau The e-mail lifeline -- summing up the year (01/15/99) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Why we just might get fast Internet lines in our homes before we're all dead (01/14/99) The tortured soul of the Silicon Valley CEO By Janelle Brown Tech-business thrillers put Gates, Jobs on the couch (01/13/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - t h e r e_.g o e s_.t h e ___neighborhood ARE COMPANIES LIKE GEOCITIES TRULY "BUILDING COMMUNITIES" -- OR JUST PLASTERING ADS ON INCOMPLETE, OUT-OF-DATE WEB PAGES? BY JANELLE BROWN | Welcome to my home at GeoCities. I live at 9258 Fashion Avenue, in a neighborhood appropriately called Salon. I moved in here earlier last week because I was told that "Design, Beauty and Glamour are the toast of Fashion Avenue," but so far there's not a whiff of glamour to be seen -- my neighborhood is a ghost town of hundreds of empty pages, half-started Web sites and vacant lots; only a handful of the members seem to be at all interested in fashion. I suppose my bare-bones Web page is no better. GeoCities may call itself the "largest and fastest growing community of personal Web sites on the Internet," but there's no community to be found in my neighborhood. "Community" is quite possibly the most over-used word in the Net industry. True community -- the ability to connect with people who have similar interests -- may well be the key to the digital world, but the term has been diluted and debased to describe even the most tenuous connections, the most minimal interactivity. The presence of a bulletin board with a few posts, or a chat room with some teens swapping age/sex information, or a home page with an e-mail address, does not mean that people are forming anything worthy of the name community. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the free Web page services -- sites like GeoCities or theglobe.com that give away free Web space and then sell ad space based on the traffic that "user-generated content" attracts. Such companies have been the darlings of Wall Street over the past year. But it remains to be seen if they can preserve the cozy promises of community that they've made to their constituency with the lavish promises of profits that they've had to make to their investors and shareholders. Free Web page services are one of the fastest growing sectors of the Web industry, enabling any person with Net access to slap up a Web site using simple tools. You can choose from scores of services: Not only the granddaddies like GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod, theglobe.com and Xoom, but smaller services like FreeYellow, FortuneCity, Nettaxi and Homestead. You can even create a home page at your favorite portal; all they ask is that they be allowed to put ads on your page. Undoubtedly, you've visited one of these services at some point -- whether you are a member of one of them yourself (together, the top seven services boast more than 20 million members) or have simply stopped by one of the member pages (GeoCities' member pages alone claim 8 percent of the content on the Web). If you haven't visited one, perhaps you've invested in them instead: Xoom, GeoCities and theglobe.com had three of the hottest initial public stock offerings of 1998, and Lycos picked up Tripod for $58 million, which it now runs along with the previously acquired Angelfire. These companies have ambitiously promoted their "communities," boasting of their astronomical numbers of members and interactive interest groups. But there's a breakdown between what's being hyped and what's actually happening at these sites: Few of the members actually seem to be communicating with one another. Most people, it seems, just want a place to slap up a picture of their cat. N E X T_ P A G E .|. "Community" is the word on every executive's lips ILLUSTRATION BY HUNGRY DOG STUDIO - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.