Sometimes, Tom Rielly gets so overwhelmed by the endless struggle with his e-mail in-box that he has to get up from the computer and just breathe. “I take an e-mail time out, by getting up and moving away from my screen,” said Rielly, the chairman and CEO of the Web site PlanetOut. Though the first thing he does in the morning is check his e-mail, and though he deals with it “20 or 30 times a day,” Rielly said he feels like he never really gets a handle on the digital flood. “It’s kind of a sport for me to see if I can keep my e-mail basket empty,” he said. “It’s a losing battle, like playing Tetris, sort of like spinning plates. At some point they fall down.” Keeping those plates spinning is part of the challenge of the Internet age. For those who get a lot of it, managing e-mail can become an obsession.

“I don’t juggle my e-mail, I stagger under it,” said Barry Golson, the editor-in-chief of Yahoo Internet Life magazine. “Though I’ve noticed a certain status-y competition among people about how much e-mail they get — you know, like discussions about whose cell phone is smaller.” Perhaps a more productive competition would be one for most innovative e-mail management strategy.

Stewart Ugelow, the 22-year-old co-founder of the Web site Student.net, could win the “most unwired” award. He has copies of all his e-mail routed to a pager. “It really has saved me from having to compulsively check my e-mail,” he said. “I’m in airports, I see people toting their laptops, and I don’t have to wait for any of that — I do a triage and pull out the pager when I have a minute.” Only the first 250 characters of each message get through to the beeper, he said, but that’s enough to get a flavor of what the e-mail is about — and to determine whether it needs an immediate response via phone. Less urgent messages can wait until Ugelow returns to the office. Responding via two-way pager would be “overkill,” he said. Another way Ugelow manages the flow of mail is by having two different e-mail addresses. One is for mailing lists and Web sites that require registration; the other is “restricted to people.” Only the “people” messages get forwarded to his pager. “I get 10 to 20 messages on my people account each day, and most of those I have to return,” he said. “I get upwards of a hundred on the other, but I know they’re not as important.”

Most people seem to use the “trash” approach to reading their mail. Golson systematically roots through his in-box, deleting the fat: any obvious spam, anything forwarded, anything resembling a public-relations pitch. Then he sorts through the legitimate stuff.

Filters are a godsend for many. A feature in most e-mail programs, filters can automatically sort, discard or forward incoming messages using criteria specified by the user. There are those, however, who suffer fear of deletion. Bryce Jasmer, a senior system engineer at a large web company who handles a thousand pieces of e-mail a day, said it took some time to get over the worry that the complex system of filters he uses to sort through his mail might inadvertently throw out or misplace something important.

Jasmer uses a special program that a friend wrote to manage the hundreds of pieces of mail he gets each day at his “six or seven” e-mail addresses, which all flow into one central box. “My filter file is a hundred lines long at least,” he said.

Filtering could be Henry Bar-Levav’s middle name. His desk at the Manhattan design firm he founded, Oven Digital, is the picture of the modern, paperless office; on it sit two neat laptops and not much else.

Bar-Levav mans his e-mail throughout the day as if he were an air-traffic controller keeping close watch over incoming and outgoing planes — and in a sense he is, routing information to his staff from the corner of a giant loft.

In order to organize all of the e-mail that crosses his virtual desktop, Bar-Levav keeps a labyrinth of electronic in-boxes. As messages come in, a phalanx of filters routes them to specific mailboxes. He also uses different colors to highlight the priority or sender of various messages. All of this correspondence would consume countless file folders and file cabinets if it weren’t electronic.

The absence of paper throughout Oven Digital’s office makes Bar-Levav proud; to him, it’s what working in the digital age is all about. Embracing the paperless office is something only younger workers do easily, said Lisa Kanarek, a professional organizer. An inherent mistrust of digital storage fuels a behavior she frequently encounters in her clients: the printing out and physical filing of e-mail messages. In particular, she remembers sifting through the material and digital clutter of one particular client and finding a printed copy of a company-wide e-mail message granting employees an extra day off the previous Christmas — housed in its very own manila folder. “How much time and effort did it waste to do that?” she marveled.

Along with five partners at Yale and Columbia in the fall of 1995, Ugelow started Student.Net Publishing, an online service that provides student-written articles, television listings, a dating service and a guide to student home pages. In March, U S West bought a 35 percent stake in the company.

That old Web rags-to-riches story - in which young webmasters toil at night for no pay and then greet a pile of corporate cash at the end of the tunnel - rings true again, this time in the offices of Student.net. With an investment from US West phone and cable company, the student-run site has gone pro and needs a designer to give it a visual punch on a daily basis.

Once part of the Nando.net site at the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, Student.net relaunched on its own in December 1995, when its founders - six undergrads from Yale and Columbia who sunk their savings into the project - produced it as a labor of love. The site provided a mix of homegrown how-to articles and interactive pranks for an audience raised on pre-CBS-buyout Letterman. “None of us took salaries for 16 months,” says the 21-year-old CEO and president, Stewart Ugelow. Last year, a gig for the Washington Post providing local college news for the DC area made the company what Stewart - in his new lingo as a Web mogul - calls a “stable product” and gave it “proof of concept” for potential investors.

It worked. A partnership with US West came along this year. Valued somewhere in the seven-figure range, the deal helped Student.net move from a cramped office in its college town of New Haven, Connecticut, to an upscale brick-and-exposed-beam number in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Traffic on the site, which was around half a million pageviews a month last year, will most likely benefit from US West’s marketing acumen (through its Yellow Pages and cable channels). And the new partnership also makes it necessary to do more issues-oriented reporting and better daily design.

A plan for beefed-up editorial is on its way. Stewart recently hired Bill Frischling and Chris Johnson as co-managing editors. As 25-year-olds, Chris and Bill are by far the elders among the eight-person staff. They bring a certain editorial gravity as former editors at washingtonpost.com. (Chris, by the way, once baby-sat for his current boss, when Stewart was a fourth-grader.) Among the topics proposed for the September relaunch are stories about student credit-card debt, an interview with the writer of the old TV show 3-2-1 Contact, an interactive tour of the Chicago subway tunnels, and coverage of national politics.

Now Stewart’s looking for a designer and illustrator to give the pages a visual boost. Looking through the primarily student-designed archive of last year’s articles, it’s clear that a more experienced eye is needed. The content of the articles is often sophomoric, but that’s all part of the appeal - in one place, a frat boy tells how to brew beer in your dorm room without attracting the health department; in another, an Ivy-League snot makes fun of incoming freshmen.

Bill, who’s hiring the new designer along with Chris and Stewart, says the amount of experience is negotiable - from just out of college to a few years on the job. They’re willing to pay US$30,000 or more, and are looking for someone who can make “seductive” designs for their features under deadline. The exact salary will vary depending on experience - like if you’ve worked for a content-driven Web site. Requirements for the job include experience publishing on the Web and fluency with HTML, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

Page templates for Student.net have already been created by a contractor, but Bill says the new designer shouldn’t be afraid to make changes. “They are going to have a lot of latitude,” he explains.

Stewart adds, “We want someone who likes to have a good time, has the ability to laugh at themselves, and has a higher mission than making money.”

Of course, every business would like to have a staff that works solely for the good of the product. But it says something about Stewart’s personal desire to see Student.net succeed that he forsook his own graduation to run the site, while the other five founders got their diplomas. In a moment of hubris mixed with acknowledgement of his new role as entrepreneur, Stewart describes his move away from school simply as “a Bill-Gates-style leave of absence.”

“There is a deep, interconnected relationship between economic growth and economic change,” lectures a briefing paper that Clinton aides will give to the top officials of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan — countries that, by and large, are averse to turbulence — and to Russia’s president, who is trying to decide which Group of Seven economy to emulate. “The process of economic change inevitably involves a certain amount of creative destruction,” the paper adds.

How does America’s flexibility spur America’s prosperity? Can other developed nations replicate it?

Probably. “It’s not genetic,” says Mancur Olson Jr., a University of Maryland economist who studies international economic patterns. But to match America’s dynamism, they must overcome significant differences in culture, history and geography. While Americans tend to embrace change for its own sake, Europeans and Japanese tend to mistrust it.

“We have a private sector … where there’s a very strong entrepreneurial, risk-oriented spirit,” Mr. Clinton said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal Wednesday. “It’s indefinable and intangible, but I think it has a lot to do with why we are who we are… . We’re sort of constantly in the act of becoming.”

One place where the foreign leaders — who open a three-day annual summit here Friday — could study American-style creative destruction, of relentless reinvention, is the Rockies’ booming capital.

Born on a Bet

Denver was born on a bet. In the mid-19th century, 100,000 people scrambled here on the long-shot hope of finding gold and, ever since, the city has ridden wave after wave of boom and bust. One silver tycoon, Horace A.W. Tabor, lost his shirt but remains a local hero; a downtown marketplace carries his name. “There’s a Western optimism, almost a romanticism of the roller coaster,” says Thomas J. Noel, a University of Colorado at Denver historian known as “Dr. Colorado,” who will give guided tours to the eight leaders’ wives. “This is a flexible, open city. Look at the movers and shakers — they all moved here from somewhere else.”

The latest bust came a decade ago when oil prices plunged and the city’s dominant petroleum companies either shut down or left town. Office vacancies neared 30%. “It became difficult to find a U-Haul because everyone was moving out,” recalls Chamber of Commerce President John I. Lay.

But, as in the wake of earlier collapses, the city rose again, not by preserving old foundations but by building new ones. The tally of mining, oil and gas industry jobs is half that of a decade ago. But that loss is more than offset by the 1,000-plus technology firms — such as computer-equipment makers and telecommunications companies — that have started up or moved here since 1992, according to the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. They have contributed to a gain of about 150,000 jobs in the past five years. Meanwhile, about 150,000 people have moved to the metropolitan area — many from California, once the main magnet for restive fortune-seekers.

Signs of Growth

Signs of creation amid the destruction are everywhere. John Hickenlooper, a furloughed oil-company geologist, used his severance check in 1988 to open Denver’s first “brew pub,” which now claims to be the country’s biggest. When his Wynkoop Brewing Co. opened in an abandoned warehouse, it was in the heart of a downtown skid row. Now, this neighborhood is home to busy restaurants and residential lofts, some costing more than $1 million. A few miles east, a failed Burlington Coat Factory store is now kept humming round the clock by TeleTech Holdings Inc., which has nearly 900 people working at the site with computers and headsets in a business that didn’t exist 15 years ago — taking toll-free phone calls for corporations that outsource the job.

Along U.S. Highway 36 toward Boulder, new corporate headquarters are rising from once-empty fields. Standing out is the jagged glass roof of Corporate Express Inc., a supplier of office products and services that was founded a decade ago by a Czech immigrant who claims to have set a national record for acquisitions last year. Meanwhile, the downtown Petroleum Club atop the gleaming Anaconda Tower, once the exclusive preserve of rich executives, changed its name just before its 50th anniversary last year to “Top of the Rockies,” reflecting the city’s corporate changing of the guard.

Not all Coloradans embrace change, of course. Conservationists constantly battle development. And the old guard frets as its clout erodes. “All these newcomers came here and want to change the rules after they get here — they immediately want the mountain roads paved, and fiber-optic cables and sewers put out to their homes,” gripes Greg Walcher, president of Club 20, which represents the mining, logging and agricultural interests in Colorado’s 20 western counties. “The traditional businesspeople are finding themselves in a small minority all of a sudden.”

Colorado Gov. Roy Romer notes, “I’ve tried to stay with traditional industries, but you know that’s not where the new world is.” Recently named chairman of the Democratic National Committee as a symbol of the party’s attempt to appear more centrist and pragmatic, he explains his governing philosophy this way: “I have never been a person who tried to draw a line or build a fence around Colorado. The free market just doesn’t work that way.”

The Flexibility Factor

An essential force behind America’s comparative dynamism is its flexibility — in labor markets, capital markets and corporate culture. “The real issue is whether the economy can take a fixed set of resources at any point in time and allocate them to their most productive uses,” says Paul Romer, a Stanford University economist, an expert on growth — and the governor’s son and sometime adviser. “If you lock in those resources where they are, when opportunities change you won’t be able to respond.”

One basic tactic for reallocating resources is the ruthless firing of workers, a common American practice that horrifies most Europeans and Japanese. Storage Technology Corp.’s record profits partly result from laying off about 1,700 employees — nearly 15% of its work force — in less than two years, says David E. Weiss, the chief executive of the Denver-area maker of mainframe tape and disk drives. “We looked in the mirror and saw we just weren’t fit,” he explains. “It took us too long to get products out, and it was too expensive to develop products.”

Mr. Weiss says he tried to handle the layoffs “with a humanistic approach.” But he shudders when contemplating how he might have revitalized the company if impeded by European-type labor rules. “Take France with their latest election — they want a 35-hour work week but don’t want to change pay,” he says incredulously. “Nobody knows how they’re going to pay for it.”

American-style volatility can impose severe side effects, such as job insecurity, wage stagnation and increased inequality of income. “The U.S. has done a better job of creating employment, but Europe has done a better job of maintaining wages for those staying employed,” says Lawrence Katz, a Harvard University labor expert. The Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce concedes that regional wages rose more slowly than inflation as thousands of jobs were created between 1993 and 1996.

Wealth in the Long Run

But the American model assumes that, in the long run, an economy usually produces new wealth by not trying too hard to preserve old wealth. “Our firms can fire; so they hire,” says C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics in Washington. “Japanese and German firms can’t fire; so they don’t hire.” The American model, he argues, “is definitely better for everybody. In a world where all companies have to compete globally, you have to get with it in terms of market-oriented approaches, or you will suffer.”

In a vibrant economy, labor flexibility also lets workers job-hop for higher wages, an option not available to, say, the many Japanese workers still tethered to a lifetime employment system. These days, StorageTek worries less about shedding inefficient employees than about losing its best ones to Sun Microsystems Inc.’s research-and-development campus opening this fall just across the road.

Moreover, job-market flexibility helps foster the new companies that many economists say can spur job growth. StorageTek was founded in 1969 by defectors from International Business Machines Corp.’s Boulder facility. Then, in 1985, three StorageTek engineers moved on to create Exabyte Corp., a maker of tape drives and automated-tape libraries that now has more than 1,000 employees in the area.

American creativity also flows from a huge, free-wheeling capital market. In the late 1980s, analysts hailed the stable, centralized financial sectors of Japan and Germany, which supposedly permitted wise planning by freeing corporate managers from quarterly profit worries. But now experts say those systems didn’t force needed restructuring and shunned innovative outsiders seeking seed money.

“Anybody can raise money in this country,” says David Hale, chief economist of Zurich Kemper Investments Inc. in Chicago. “Our venture-capital market is unchallenged. Our banking system is highly decentralized. In America, there are all kinds of second and third chances to raise money.”

Rapid Success

Denver’s main telecommunications company, U S West Inc., recently cut a seven-figure check for 21-year-old Yale senior Stewart Ugelow — a former summer intern at this newspaper — for a 35% stake in his Internet Web site, which publishes news-feature stories and data such as TV and concert listings for college students. Student.Net Publishing LLC is less than two years old, and none of its six founders has any prior business experience. “We don’t have anybody on staff yet old enough to rent a car. That’s one of our goals for our next hire,” Mr. Ugelow says.

“You bet there’s a risk” in this investment, says Tony Pantuso, director of business development for U S West’s interactive-services group. But Mr. Ugelow’s very greenness makes him appealing. “In the multimedia world, a lot of good things are being done by people under 25,” Mr. Pantuso, 34, explains. “It’s not polluted by people such as myself that kill these things because they can’t see the business.”

Government also plays an important role in fostering Denver’s, and America’s, boom, more by providing the foundations for growth than by managing a lot of things in the European or Japanese mode. Gov. Romer supports new transportation projects, such as the Denver International Airport. The federal government is a large, stable employer in Denver. Colorado has a highly educated work force, thanks to heavy public spending on universities. The University of Colorado’s biology and chemistry departments have generated a thriving biotechnology industry.

To be sure, traits considered American assets could again become liabilities, as they were not long ago. Flexibility works “in an era of rapid change,” such as the current period of technological advances and globalization, says Yale School of Management Dean Jeffrey E. Garten, a former Clinton adviser. “If we get to another plateau where it’s possible to anticipate long-term trends, I think we’ll see a dramatic resurgence of Japanese and European companies.” The idea “that we have the superior model for all time is a very dangerous mindset.” And Mr. Bergsten concedes that America’s sometimes-excessive market brutality “could trigger a backlash against our model.”

Copying Some Ideas

But for now, the Europeans and Japanese are trying to emulate some elements of the American model. On Monday, European leaders endorsed creation of a European Investment Bank credit line to help small high-tech companies on a continent short of venture capital. When meeting with President Clinton, Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto is expected to offer a progress report on plans to deregulate Tokyo’s rigid financial markets.

However, some differences between the U.S. and its main allies transcend labor, capital and regulation policies. America is blessed with a large, integrated market — something Europeans are struggling to create — that facilitates great changes within national borders. Common language, currency and customs allow companies and workers to move easily among states. “Imagine if IBM was in one country, and Microsoft and Intel were in another country,” says Mr. Romer, the economist. “Nationalism would have led to a very strong attempt to protect IBM. We’re very fortunate to have a big-enough marketplace to allow this process of entry and exit to take place without invoking the kind of nationalistic fervor that makes people want to stop this process.”

U.S. companies don’t feel tied to specific states. When TeleTech founder Kenneth D. Tuchman grew frustrated with California’s business climate, he shut his headquarters there in 1993 and moved to Colorado. In California, “the governor never seemed to find the time to take our phone calls, let alone meet with us. We clearly weren’t big enough; we weren’t well-known,” he says. “In this state, I can pick up the phone, call the governor, and I’ll be put through immediately.”

There’s also a historical and cultural divide between the U.S. and other countries. Americans share myths and images about themselves quite different from those treasured by Europeans and Japanese. The American Revolution and the Jeffersonian ideals that shaped the early republic sought, in part, to abolish the Old World’s rigid hierarchies and government controls. France, too, had its revolution, in pursuit of “liberty, equality and fraternity,” but in recent years its policies have sometimes promoted equality and fraternity at the expense of economic freedom.

Frontier Mentality

The U.S. “frontier mentality” romanticized the notion of boundless opportunities to seek new chances and create new lives; the North American continent’s seemingly infinite natural resources enhanced that optimism. The Japanese, in contrast, call themselves “a small island nation with few natural resources” needing careful planning and sharing; they speak with mistrust about “confusion in the marketplace.” Mr. Clinton cites “the fact that we’ve remained open to new entrants, to new immigrants, to [this] sort of new energies” — in contrast to other developed nations defined more by common race, religion or nationality. Despite great social changes, Britain’s elite is still strongly shaped by family and old-school ties.

American innovation is spurred as well by an acceptance of business failure that other countries find unnerving, plus an embrace of rapid success that others consider crass. Failure in the Old World can permanently stain a business reputation. But to Bank of Boulder President Steven K. Bosley, “bankruptcy doesn’t have a stigma” if it isn’t because of poor ethics or poor management. “We’ll lend money to such a person in another venture. There are examples of people here who haven’t made it, but come back on their second, third or even fourth try to be successful.”

And entrepreneurs can get very rich very quickly. Bill Phillips used $185 of savings a decade ago to found Experimental & Applied Sciences Inc., a maker of nutritional supplements for athletes. He now estimates his net worth at $40 million. Last week, when the 31-year-old was honored as a “Rocky Mountain Entrepreneur of the Year,” his acceptance speech was an unabashed defense of American-style success. “I’m sorry,” he told a cheering crowd, “but winning does not suck!”

In a high-level form of corporate recruiting, US West announced Thursday that it is acquiring a 35 percent stake in Student.Net Publishing - the largely self-financed publisher of college-interest Web content run by a group of Yale and Columbia undergraduates. The deal represents the sixth Internet content partnership that the telecommunications giant has formed since last summer.

Student.Net - which has been run for 16 months from what the site calls “a room with an unhealthily high computer-and-takeout-container-to-person ratio in the center of New Haven, Connecticut,” on a total of US$150,000 - stands to gain a seven-figure cash infusion. “It lived on fumes,” says 21-year-old CEO Stewart Ugelow, who intends to use the unaccustomed wealth to bolster his staff of six, work up a formal marketing campaign, and buy improved hardware for the new office in Boston.

US West hopes, in return, to move into the college market that Student.Net serves because “the demographic is so strong,” says Tony Pantuso, the director of business development for US West Interactive, explaining that students are appealing to advertisers and is a group that spends the most time online.

Ugelow explains that it’s just that kind of undergraduate immersion that makes his group so valuable to US West, despite their extreme youth. “We were freshmen when Mosaic came out,” he says. “We had a lot of spare time.”

The site is a far cry from an extracurricular time-killer for a group of dorm underachievers, however. Rather, it was originally conceived as a Nando.Net project, before the student-founders - who have summer job experience at companies like The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft, and Nortel - took over when Nando itself was bought out and dropped the project in 1995.

The college arena has more to offer Web companies than just an audience of “7 million cherry-picked students,” agrees Roland De Wolk - who teaches Web journalism and runs a student site out of San Francisco State University. It’s difficult, he says, for journalists with old-media experience to “turn it on its head” and create innovative Internet content. Instead, “real smart journalism students with some brains and some moxie are where to look for it.”

Ugelow used his undergraduate connections at The Washington Post to forge a sponsorship deal with that paper. The relationship consisted of advertising, consulting work, and the licensing of Student.Net content for a local version of the site, which became the college area of the online Post.

That site will probably serve as a model of sorts for the localized Student.Net content US West plans to adapt for the education section of its Dive In network of local sites - scheduled to launch this month in 10 cities. This time, however, Student.Net “can be local in a way we couldn’t before,” says Ugelow, citing the sales forces already in place for US West’s various cable and phone systems.

The timing of the investment aids Student.Net students as well, since they all graduate in May and will now stay on with the company. But Ugelow sees dangers in the sudden wealth. “We’ve been good about keeping frugal,” he says. “We want to keep the incentive to come up with creative solutions.”

College journalists, like the “pros,” are busy thinking up and implementing creative online publishing ideas. Many would argue that the most creative thinking in fact is coming from campuses, since young people are so much more attuned to working with computers and comfortable with Internet technology.

Student.Net is a nice example of a group of college students creating a professional-quality online “publication.” This start-up (it launched last week) has created a national (U.S.) college “newsmagazine” on the World Wide Web. It features a daily cover story aimed at the college crowd, plus features like personal ads, a directory of U.S. college students’ home pages, a television programming guide, pointers to the best Web sites of interest to college students, and an archive of cover stories. It’s a professional-looking site that outdoes a lot of online services produced by commercial publishers.

The venture is headed by Stewart Ugelow, a 20-year-old history major in his junior year at Yale University. Four months ago he joined with a group of friends and colleagues — including 8 classmates at Yale and several others scattered around the U.S. — to piece together Student.Net. Staff members — writers, editors, programmers and artists — are all volunteers “doing it for the love of it,” working with the idea in mind that they’ll be paid when the venture takes off as a commercial enterprise. In fact, the modest amount of money invested in the project has come out of staff members’ pockets. There’s no outside seed money at this point. The non-paid staff includes some talented programmers who have interned at places like Microsoft and Bell Labs.

Says Ugelow of the venture, “We started this because we felt like it was important that there be an independent college publication on the Web, one that was created by students and not by corporate marketers. Just as the soc.college.* newsgroups get spammed all the time by ‘make money fast’ types, most Web sites aimed at college students so far are nothing more than advertising slickly disguised as content.”

Student.Net changes content 5 days a week when colleges are in session. It’s a quick read; you probably won’t spend a lot of time perusing it each day. And that’s as a Web site should be, particularly one targeting busy college students who are unlikely to sit still for long. Cover stories are meant to be useful to the college crowd, such as the essay about how a student finagled 3 free tickets and a first-class upgrade out of the airlines by getting “bumped” from several flights over the Thanksgiving holiday. Another piece is about how to home-brew beer in your dorm room.

A nice feature that I haven’t seen elsewhere yet is found in the TV programming section. A search feature allows you to find out when your favorite TV show is on next. When you receive the results of the search, you can click a box, fill in your email address, send in a form, and the system will send you an email reminder the day before your show airs next. Student.Net gets its TV listings from TVData, which gave Ugelow a good deal, he says.

A personals ad section offers the typical mate-wanted fare. But it uses an email address registration scheme that allows prospective mates to correspond via email with their identity and real email address concealed. This is similar to a system pioneered by Electric Classifieds of San Francisco in its Match.com Web personals service, which allows confidential communication without the parties being able to contact each other directly (until both parties agree to do so). This is an important component of any online personals ad service, to help protect users from being harassed.

Future features are likely to include adding an interactive component so users can talk back and to each other, plus some innovative uses of the Java programming language. The site will expand to include more editorial content, such as a Friday entertainment section. Ugelow is reticent to tell the commercial publishing world about what he’s going to introduce next, saying that some of Student.Net’s future features haven’t been tried by commercial publishers yet.

The target audience is the college crowd, which Ugelow views as underserved by other online publishers. Web sites like Word or HotWired are aimed at the “older” 20-something audience, he says, and don’t really speak to his intended viewers. Sites that do target college students — other than the obvious online editions of campus newspapers — tend to be marketing driven and have little in the way of original editorial content, he says.

The site currently has no advertising, though that is how the service will ultimately be supported; Ugelow says he is opposed to charging a fee for access to content. Unfortunately for Student.Net, advertisers have been reticent to do business “with a bunch of 19-year-olds,” Ugelow says. “We’ve been having some credibility problems.”

Student.Net temporarily resides on rented server space but Ugelow plans to move it to his own computers on his own T-1 line soon. Some of the hardware comes from the student staff members, some of whom agreed to loan a new computer to the cause rather than update their older personal machines.

The site has had no formal marketing, with traffic coming from word of mouth mostly and inclusion as a Spider’s Pick of the Day. As of yesterday, Student.Net had 1,561 individual visitors since launch last Thursday.

Ugelow says he’s been overloaded the last few months juggling classes and Student.Net, so he’s taking next semester off along with a few of his buddies to devote to the project. His father, while proud of his son’s initiative, still insists that Ugelow graduate.

So, watch out, professional publishers. Among the competitors you should be watching are a bunch of college students willing to work for nothing, drawing on the talents of new-media-savvy friends and colleagues around the world. It’s just this kind of venture, created on a shoestring but the result rivaling professional publishers’ products, that the Internet is all about.

I heard a helicopter landing, and they rushed me to it. It’s hard not to be scared when you’re being “medevacked” to a hospital with another child next to you screaming and a paramedic telling you not to move. As soon as the helicopter landed, they rushed me to the emergency room. Dad was in Ohio on a business trip, but my mom got there after about a half hour. Having her with me really helped.

The pain was terrible. I was beyond crying. It’s funny, all I wanted to do was sleep. But they wouldn’t let me. They kept asking me how to spell my name, and I was shouting, “S-T-E-W-A-R-T. Got it?” They did that to make sure that I wasn’t going into shock. I kept asking when I could sleep. I was either hot or cold. They put heat lamps on me and I was too hot, and they took them off and I was freezing. It was horrible.

Next, they moved me to the ICU-the intensive care unit designed especially for burn patients. There was a high risk of infection, so they started the process of skin grafts as soon as possible. It was clear that my hands had been so badly burned that skin grafts would be necessary. The surgery on my hands took place three days after the accident. My hands had to be elevated all the time after the surgery, so I had to learn to sleep on my back. Later I had two additional operations for skin grafting on my forehead, neck and arms.

The day-to-day pain was terrible. It was so bad I couldn’t think about anything else. I didn’t realize how serious my situation was; that is, how close I was to being disabled in a major way. I couldn’t have dealt with the pain without the support of my parents. If they hadn’t been there behind me, I would have given up at the first turn, the first struggle. My parents forced me to keep going. My mom stayed with me during the days, and my dad spent the nights. They didn’t let him sleep in the room at first, so for a week and a half my dad slept out in the lobby on the most uncomfortable plastic chair you can imagine-just to be near me.

I was in the hospital for 38 days. In five weeks, I had to go through three operations for the needed skin grafts. In addition, I had to wear splints on my hands and arms to keep my skin from contracting as it healed. I had a ton of bandages, which had to be changed three times a day. Some of them would stick, which was really painful.

Getting mail meant a lot to me while I was in the hospital. I got a letter from the Redskins that really cheered me up. It said: “We know of your strength and fortitude and we hope you’ll keep your spirits up . . . Ask any pro player and he’ll say that the worst thing is to get down. You must fight for yourself, give 110 percent, and things turn out for the best. Give it your best shot and feel good about that. We’re all rooting for you.” They sent me a football too.

Meanwhile, I kept imagining the accident happening over and over again. It was so horrible, it was bottled up in me. I was always fearful that something would happen while I was sleeping, that the hospital would blow up or something like that.

The social workers in the hospital were nice, but I didn’t like the psychiatrists at all. One day I woke up, and there was this man standing over me. He introduced himself and told me that he was a psychiatrist. He wasn’t exactly my favorite person because he would pop in at times when I wanted to be left alone, and he refused to leave unless I talked to him. It was intimidating because I felt I had no control over things. Finally I told my mom that I wanted to describe what had happened, and I wanted her to take notes of what I said. Telling my mom everything that happened made me feel better than telling the psychiatrist. I also wrote poems about my accident so that I’ll have something to look back on in future years.

Since burns take a very long time to heal, I had to go through a lot for the rest of the year. After I got out of the hospital, it took weeks for me to get my strength back, even to get dressed by myself. When I finally got back to school, I wasn’t allowed to go out to recess because getting too much sun might affect the coloring of my skin grafts and because people were afraid I’d get hurt.

My parents had to play the role of the bad guy with me a lot during this time, which was very hard on them. They saw a psychiatrist who told them not to smother me with attention or spoil me. If I didn’t want to take a bath, which I usually didn’t want to do, my dad would just pick me up and put me in the tub anyway. I’d be begging him to stop and I’d cry, but he wouldn’t give in. Sometimes my parents would cry, but they both knew that there was only one chance to get my skin to heal with the best results, and they were determined that everything possible would be done.

Having all this happening at home was very hard on my 6-year-old brother. My parents tried to give him a lot of attention, but that was hard because of all my medical care and physical therapy. It wasn’t until after I began to recover that we were treated pretty equally.

My face and arms had to be covered with a special pressure garmen that looked like a tight stocking. It was designed to maximize healing, minimize scarring and reduce the sunlight reaching my skin, because any sunburn would be very painful and would affect the permanent coloration of my skin grafts. The face mask fit tightly like a ski mask. I had to wear it all day except for eating and bathing. It hurt when I took it off and put it back on because my hair would get stuck in the Velcro fastener down the back. Sometimes my forehead would bleed on the edge of my skin graft, and the skin and the mask would stick together, making it really hurt to take the mask off.

When I found out that I was supposed to wear that mask for an entire year, I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like forever. At first I refused to wear it, and my father had to force me to put it on. We had some pretty big fights about this. He got a couple of punches in the stomach. My parents kept telling me that in a few years, I would appreciate having worn the mask. Looking back now, I see they were right-the time went quicker than I thought it would, and I know it made the scars heal better.

Still, it was a hard time for me. A lot of people made flip remarks about the mask. Adults that I’d never met felt that they could jeer at a little twerp. They’d say, “Oh, Halloween’s come late this year” or, “Are you from the latest monster movie?” Little kids were scared of me. They would run away when I came into a room. It got so bad that I was afraidto go to the bank with my mother. I thought that people would be suspicious of somebody even my size wearing a mask.

I think the accident has made me a bit more independent than somebody my age would normally be. Even though my parents backed me up, it’s a fight I had to make on my own. Their support helped me, but it didn’t win the emotional battle for me. I had to do that for myself.

The biggest thing I’ve had to deal with is my fear of fire. At first, I couldn’t even stay at birthday parties when the cake came. Then I realized it wasn’t doing me any good to run away, and I forced myself to sit there while they blew out the candles. Recently, I went to dinner at Benihana’s. I had to prepare myself for it because the flaming oil used for cooking on the grill made me afraid that if there was a fire, my family and I wouldn’t be able to escape. When we were done, I saw that I could control my fears to some extent. I even had to work at watching movies with fires in them. When I was in the hospital, there was a movie on TV that ended with a bombing and fiery plane crash. It gave me nightmares for a week, but in the end it helped me fight my fears.

In some ways this experience has shattered my innocence. I lost any hope of believing in religion. I ask myself, “If there’s a God, why would He do this to a 9-year-old?” If there’s a mighty and powerful Creator who controls the world, He wouldn’t let things like this happen. Sometimes I get angry that this happened to me, and sometimes I get sad. Other times I don’t mind it at all.

My life is a fight-against my fears and for my future. It’s not easy right now, but the worst will all be over in a year or two. I’m pretty sure that I’ll never walk into a singles bar and have somebody say, “Ooh, you’re so handsome.” But in the course of the next few years, I’ll probably have a few more operations to smooth out some of the scars.

For all I know, the scars will be an eternity. But I feel that if I know somebody really well and they know me, my scars shouldn’t be a barrier.

Ugelow’s card was chosen from among 3,500 entries submitted by fourth, fifth and sixth graders of the District’s public, private and parochial schools.

The front of the card features drawings of a diamond ring, a car, a fur coat, and two money bags, along with the legend, “Mom, because you deserve the best . . .”

Ugelow’s card has a poem on the inside:

“Thanks to you
I’m always being fed
So I thought you’d might like
breakfast in bed,
But I got you this card instead,
And let it be said,
That I love you,
And that is true,
Happy Mother’s Day,
Toodleloo . . . .”

This is the fifth year Kentucky Fried Chicken and Good Housekeeping have conducted the contest that selects a winner for each of the 50 states and the District.

Kentucky Fried Chicken will award Ugelow with a home computer and a special certificate of merit. The card will be displayed along with those of the state contest winners at the Empire State Building in New York City from May 7 to June 12.

The blast occurred in a science laboratory at Murch Elementary School, on 36th and between Ellicott and Davenport streets NW, where 14 students enrolled in a summer enrichment program for gifted youngsters were making fireworks commonly known as “sparklers,” D.C. police officials said.

D.C. school spokeswoman Janis Cromer later called the experiment “inappropriate” and said the materials used, which are similar to those used in gunpowder, were “not supposed to be in the schools whatsoever.”

The program at Murch, called “Summer Discovery,” is paid for by parents at $165 per pupil and is supervised and taught by educators hired by the program. School system personnel and funds are not involved. Cromer said that when school administrators reviewed plans for the program several weeks ago, there was “no mention of the sparklers experiment.”

Two 9-year-old boys injured by the explosion were taken by helicopter to Children’s Hospital, where they were admitted to the intensive care unit in critical condition.

One boy suffered second- and third-degree burns over 20 percent of his body, with his face, arms and hands badly burned, according to a hospital spokeswoman. The other was said to have suffered burns over a slighty smaller portion of his body.

The two 9-year-olds were identified as Dedrick Howell, a student at Eaton Elementary School, and Stewart Ugelow, who attends Murch, school officials confirmed. It was unclear which boy had the more serious injuries.

In addition, two 8-year-olds, a girl and a boy, were taken by ambulance to Children’s, where they were listed in good condition last night. The girl, identified as Puja Malholtra, was slightly burned, while the boy, identified as Jonathan Foer, suffered shock as a result of the violent blast but was not burned. The two, both of whom attend Murch, were being held for observation last night, officials said.

The students had been instructed to mix the combustible substances — potassium perchlorate, sulfur, charcoal, iron powder and aluminum powder — in large bowls and grind them as fine as sugar, according to Charles Butta, director of the two-week program.

Later in the week, they were to use an adhesive to apply the powdery mixture to wires from coat hangers to make sparklers similar to those used during Independence Day celebrations.

Moments before the explosion, one of the students apparently disobeyed instructions and started jamming a wire into his bowl of substances. The impact of the wire apparently created a spark that ignited the powders, said Butta, who described the accident as “horrible” and “traumatic.”

Michael Nickens, 10, who was participating in the experiment but was not injured, described it as a fun exercise that went horribly awry. “We were making sparklers,” he said. “Everybody was following instructions, but one boy got frustrated and started shaking the bowl and hitting it with a little masher. He said, ‘Oh, this is neat.’ All the other kids said, ‘Stop. Don’t do that.’ And then it exploded.

“I just ran out of that classroom. I ran as fast as I could.”

Cromer said, “That type of experiment is not one that we would use in our curriculum. The only three chemicals allowed in D.C. schools for experiments are vinegar, baking soda and alum. In the view of the D.C. schools, this would not be an experiment that would be appropriate.”

A Summer Discovery brochure says the program is supposed to involve courses in earth science, mathematics, critical thinking skills, computers, aerobics, biology and astronomy. School officials said chemistry replaced the scheduled astronomy class because an astronomy instructor was not available.

Butta said chemistry teacher Lou Jagoe and a second teacher were in the lab at the time, but neither was watching the student who allegedly caused the explosion.

The blast knocked one student to the floor and sent others running down the hallways, witnesses said.

“The explosion sounded like a cannon had fired . . . . There was a big boom,” said one teacher who asked not to be identified. Two persons who were on the playground said they heard the blast and saw yellow smoke billowing from the windows of the science lab.

The blast left the top of one table singed; sheets of newspaper that had covered it were turned to ashes. The sour smell of smoke filled the lab. There was no other apparent damage to the building.

Yesterday was the first day of what was expected to be a three-part chemistry experiment, said Butta, whom school system officials said is a University of Maryland professor. Butta founded the enrichment program at American University several years ago for elementary school students and introduced it to the city school system this summer.

School board member Wanda Washburn (Ward 3) said she was “concerned” about the accident, but described the program as “innovative and challenging.” The program has 30 students.