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.

There's a saying in many of the newsrooms that I've worked in: "Every time we run an obituary, we've lost a subscriber."

The reason, of course, is that people my age are not reading newspapers anymore.

I realize many of you are still developing your online strategies, but in an effort to keep things from repeating themselves, I'd like to talk to you today about your future users and a phenomenon you may not be aware of.

There are currently 14.4 million two-year and four-year college students in the United States. And that number is projected to grow to 19.2 million in the year 2000.

The most important piece of advice I can give you is go visit a college campus and get to know these people. Because there is no better focus group for what the future holds than a college campus today.

Inspired by widely available grant money and student demand, colleges are racing to connect every dorm room to the Internet. College students have high speed connections and often receive their access for free. They don't have to tie up a phone line; fight with their spouse or their kids for use of the computer; or worry about their boss looking over their shoulder. Plus, they use the Internet 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

While they read fewer newspapers, listen to less radio, and watch less television, college students use the Internet more than any other demographic group.

While college students make up just five percent of the U.S. population, at least one in every five Internet users is a college student.

Indeed, 85 percent of college students are projected to use the Internet at least once this semester, 62 percent at least once per week, and 50 percent will use it every single day.

All told, college students will spend 70 million hours online this week alone.

And it's not hard to see why.

Online discussion groups are replacing face-to-face sessions with professors. Classwork is assigned and submitted online. Already, students are using the web to find out what's for dinner, what's showing on campus, how the football team did, and what the weather forecast is.

And best of all, why bother picking up the phone to call Mom & Dad when you can ask for more money by e-mail?

Yet for all their numbers online, college students are dramatically underserved by today's online content offerings. Our company is working to fill that void.

We publish a site called Student.Com that combines the writing of the nation's top collegiate journalists with innovative uses of Internet technology to create a comprehensive, in-depth site devoted to college life. Many of the lessons we've learned will be applicable to you in your efforts.

Our site currently has four main concentrations:

1. A daily newsmagazine written by college journalists from around the country. We cover everything from financial aid policies to new movies and music to how to brew beer in your dorm room. If you're 21 or over, of course.

2. Community enabling features that help to facilitate interaction between our members. Among the most popular is "Yenta, the Student.Com matchmaker." An early version of Yenta allowed users to indicate whether they were a "prince" or a "princess" and whether they were searching for a "prince," a "princess," or an &quot artist formerly known as Prince."

3. Information services that help students to organize their lives. For instance, our site is the only place on the Internet where you can search television listings for up to six weeks and get e-mail reminders before a show airs.

4. Entertaining interactive features like the "Rejectomatic" which sends fake rejection letters to your friends. If any of you were rejected for the position of "coffee filtration technician," that was us — and we're sorry.

Over time, college students will get their news from us, meet new friends through us, buy their course books through us — and maybe even land a White House internship through us.

So what does this mean to you? A number of things:

1. Be ready for a world when your site is "always on."

College graduates will be a driving force in the deployment of broadband Internet access to the home. News cycles will increasingly have less meaning.

2. Allow users to shape their own experience and help them manage their lives.

How many of you are putting school lunch menus into databases that will let parents know when a meal their child won't eat is being served?

Or what about geomapping your crime reports so users can see where the dangerous parts in their neighborhoods are?

Or what about something simple, like letting users post the locations of pot holes and street signs that need fixing?

3. Experiment with story forms and conventions.

You're not going to attract young readers by doing the same types of writing as in your print editions.

4. Build context into whatever you do.

Give people access to the tools they need to make the decisions in their lives.

Finally, I'd like to leave you with one thought: For all the bells and whistles, the Internet is still at its heart a medium of words. If we as an industry can get college students to read online, there just may be hope for newspapers yet.

First of all, I can tell you a little bit about myself and our company. Unlike most Internet businesses, we are particularly unusual in that when we started this project, we had never expected to start a business. Our company was founded in November of 1995, while I was a junior at Yale University, and my partners were four classmates of mine at Yale and a classmate from high school who goes to Columbia University. My background is not that of a businessman or a computer person, but as a print journalist.

Over the last five summers I’ve written for the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the Raleigh News & Observer as a reporter and in other capacities, and have been covering the Internet for them since things started taking off.

Many of you may have seen some of my stories on things like domain name speculation, which was a few years ago when there were people who were out registering all sorts of domain names that were potentially [useful] for Fortune 500 companies. That story has been reprinted in a lot of places.

The question before us is really, if you’re going to build a business from content, how are the ways to do it? I think, while Student.Net may be a bit on the unusual side, there are a lot of things that we have learned over the past year that may be applicable to your business that you’re running now, or that you’re contemplating running.

For one thing, there is how our company was started. We were cash poor from the beginning. We relied heavily on sweat, sweat equity, and volunteers to contribute content. We had to expend that with a number of different business models before we really hit on the one that we’re using now.

We had originally started working on the site with the understanding that we were going to be working with a larger corporate partner, the News & Observer, which had been one of the newspapers I had worked with. But during a corporate acquisition, their new media division had to switch strategic focuses and we were one of the projects that were sort of cast off on our own. We talked to a lot of people about working with us and we were told, “It sounds like you guys have great ideas, but I mean, really, you’re six college students with no products, no revenues and no experience. Why don’t you come back to us when you have a site and you have a business.” That has been sort of model that we’ve been operating from for the last 16 months.

So when we started the site, we basically had three rules. The first was that our content should be useful and compelling. The second was that we didn’t want to duplicate content that exists offline, that college students would ordinarily be exposed to. Finally, we wanted to update the site frequently to encourage repeat visits. So our original content mix was a combination of daily stories that were written by college journalists around the country, and even from Canada, who were either looking to do something that they couldn’t accomplish in their traditional college newspapers or simply wanted the exposure of writing for a larger audience.

To differentiate ourselves from the typical college newspaper that focuses very much on the day-to-day administration of a university, we focused on stories that were useful or quirky or interesting, that students wouldn’t normally find.

A good example was our cover story, which still gets us a lot of hits today. It was a guide to brewing beer in your dorm room. Over the course of the year, we did everything from guides to cheap travel, we sent reporters to cover the New Hampshire primaries and had all sorts of interviews with interesting students and professors around the country who are doing things that you wouldn’t ordinarily hear about.

We also had a number of interactive features, and the one that has gotten us perhaps the most attention is a feature that we developed called “TV Search and Remind,” which was a searchable listing with a twist. It still is the only place on the Internet where you can search television listings for up to a month. You go and you type in [something] like “Seinfeld,” and it comes up with all the Seinfeld [shows] for the next month, with the plots and the times and the show channels. Next to each one of those shows is a button, and if you click the button at the bottom, there’s another button that says, “Send me e-mail before this show is on.” So you would get an e-mail the day before saying, “Student.Net just wants to remind you that this show is on at this time, and by the way, be sure to come back to Student.Net and check out what we are doing.”

It allowed us to both build a relationship with our users — it gave them a capability that was not possible in traditional media — and got us a tremendous amount of press attention. Actually, that from the “Only on the Internet” story. Three weeks after launching our site, with no publicity other than word of mouth, we have been written about in the Los Angeles Times.

So it can happen to you.

We had chosen our market as college students for two reasons, both because we knew the market from an editorial standpoint, being college students ourselves, and also because we saw that there was this vast demographic group that was online in numbers larger than any other. We knew that 98% of U.S. colleges have access to e-mail, most of them have direct connections from their rooms or some sort of high-speed, T-1-level access to a public computing cluster.

And unlike traditional markets, college students were able to use the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unlike people who are at work and have work to do, or who were at home and were fighting their kids for use of the computer and were connecting over very slow modems. That gave us an advantage that we had this audience that was already there, that was using the Internet and was desperate for quality content aimed at them.

But obviously, there’s some things from our market that won’t apply to what you all are doing, so I thought I’d walk you through some of the steps that we used to identify the right market.

First of all, I want to address the misconception that a lot of people have going into an Internet business: the Internet is not inherently a mass medium. There are a lot of people on the Internet, but it does not work the same way as broadcast journalism does or traditional print media, in that people are able to very selectively jump from source to source, and even using just basic HTML, combine the various elements any way they want.

Instead, it’s helpful to view the Internet as a collection of overlapping special interest groups.

By that I mean that even though people who come to our site are college students, they actually have all sorts of different interests and align themselves in ways different than just by their age or where they live. Particularly in the area of city guides, I would point out that a lot of people are approaching those as, you know, here are people who are defined by a local group. They are all people who live in a certain city, but people really view themselves as defined in a lot of ways. They may be parents, they may be programmers, they may be sports fans.

So it’s important to keep that in mind when you’re designing your site. People really are in various niche groups that overlap at certain points, so you want to design it so that it appeals to the largest number of overlapping groups.

It’s important to remember that you also need to be able to segment those groups as well. I would advise you to try to find niches that cannot be easily replicated off-line.

In our case, the Internet was a perfect medium, because if you want to reach college students today on a national campaign, you basically have two ways of doing it. You can buy an ad in every college newspaper in America, which is not cheap, or you can try and do on-campus promotions where people hand out mugs to get you to sign up for your credit cards. That is not cheap either. Even something like direct mail is notoriously unreliable for college students. And I would point out that just from an expense cost comparison, that to just rent a name off the direct mail list costs ten cents usually, while an Internet impression can be had for a lot less. So there was a market there that could not be reached using traditional means. Advertisers desperately wanted to reach them and this was the perfect way of doing it more efficiently and more economically.

Finally, I would encourage you to try and be a “category killer.” That is the term that is used to designate things like Home Depot or Toys R Us. How that applies to the Internet is that you need to decide what your core strength is, how you’re going to leverage that and do it really, really well. Today, advertisers are looking for bulk ads. It’s the question of who can drive the most traffic to my site.

But in the 21st century, people will not be looking quite as much for just traffic as much as demographics. The sites that succeed will be the sites that can deliver the narrowest level of audience specificity to advertisers for the most economical dollars. If a site is built today simply to attract eyeballs, that site is going to have a hard time competing three years from now when advertisers finally figure out how to measure audiences properly and get sophisticated about their buying.

It’s sort of amazing how much advertisers today are just willing to roll the dice on a site compared to the level of justification they demand for a traditional print advertisement.

There they want to see psychographics, readership surveys, market-level income and all sorts of things like that. Today, everybody is sort of feeling their way around. That’s going to change, particularly as users become more experienced in surfing the Web.

The sites that try to be all things to all people are going to have an immensely difficult time competing, because as users learn how to use bookmarks, and as they start to create their own personal Web pages with guides to the sites that they’re interested in, they will very quickly start moving to a perspective where they control the order that the information is presented and which features they go to. So, content aggregators are going to find it enormously difficult, I think.

The second thing that I need to address is the concept-of-the-community myth. Right now everyone from Steve Case to Howard Rheingold from Electronic Minds says that you need to create community around your site for it to be successful. Vast amounts of money have already been invested in such sites, and I guarantee you that there are a lot of people here who are working on business plans, probably for the very same thing. But communities are not the panacea that most people think they are. When you talk about electronic communities, we really need to ask ourselves, “What are we talking about?” The reality is, when we say “community,” we mean that they’re cheap. Our users create the content. We don’t have to update it. We don’t have to maintain it. It can be automated, and we can just serve the ads. This is the real chat room model. The problem with that is that it takes quality for people to build around.

Community just cannot created by providing people space. There has to be a reason for them to get together. I really believe that in a few years we’ll talk about the rush to build online communities much the same way as we talked about the planned communities of the 50s and 60s where people built these huge, enormous, very artificial communities that they really didn’t want to live in. Huge amounts of money were lost, and nobody really understood why at the time.

What we’ve learned from that is that there’s a reason our cities have evolved that way. People like shaping their environment, and it’s not something you can force. You have to ask yourself, on the online communities, with so many sites trying to create community, “How much community will exist when you can get it anywhere you go?” Sites that have been successful in creating community so far have been the sites that really have been around for a long time, things like The WELL. When there really wasn’t very much out there before, this was the way that people interacted. It was a chance to interact with people who are different than you and from all over the world, but now there are all these business plans for sites that are trying to create communities on local levels.

You have to ask, “Why is that any different than what I can get today in my city? Why do I need to interact with people from my city online?” Is there a compelling reason for people to do so? Some sites will succeed in this, but I have to believe that the vast majority will fail because it’s so dependent upon the users you attract, whether one of them wants to be a strong influence in the site and how much people want to participate. So from our perspective, as much as we would love to have community created among our users, from a business perspective, there are three concepts that are far more important to us.

First is what I call “self identity.” I want my users to be asking themselves, not necessarily consciously, but to be thinking about, “What does it mean about me that I use this Web site?” We already do that everyday for a lot of different topics, things like, “I drink this beer and I drink micro-brew, so that says something about me,” or, “I drive a certain car and that says something about me.” In the future, I think those brand extensions will carry over to Web sites, that people will use Yahoo over Excite because it says something about them. You need to be very conscious of what your site’s identity represents, so that it can carry over and translate to your users.

The second thing is credibility. It’s focusing on how you can build a relationship of trust with your users, because the sooner that people begin to feel that you are a peer of theirs, the more likely they are to come back and to visit and participate in your community. Finally, I’d encourage you to focus on personality. I think a lot of sites are really missing an opportunity to convey that there’s more behind them than just monolithic corporations. It’s a chance to show your users that the people who work on your Web site are real people with real problems and the same concerns and daily stresses that the users have, and for a chance to build a marketing relationship that has not existed before.

We have been very conscious in our site design to always sign things with our first names, to include pictures of our authors whenever possible and to encourage people to e-mail us personally. We respond. It’s been really quite successful, and I think I’ve developed a relationship with a lot more of our users than I ever would have from my print experience.

So how does this apply to a site that you are building? Since this is “21st Century Publishing Strategies,” I thought I’d list a few 21st century publishing tactics for you to use.

First of all, I would encourage you to design your content to leverage what I call “self-selecting affinity groups.” If you accept that your site is really visited by groups of overlapping, selfspecialized interest groups, it’s important to design your site today so that when the ad dollars are there, you can easily differentiate between them. I will give you two examples of how we did that.

First, we were very conscious, in the TV search-and-remind feature, to design the response pages with the results of your search, so that we could very easily target different ads to different television shows.

If an advertiser came to us and said that they wanted to reach viewers of Seinfeld and another advertiser wanted to reach Murder, She Wrote, it’s very easy for us to do that. People feel very passionately about their television shows and their regular viewing. We found tremendous success in the people who have said, “Hey, here’s how I just push one line of HTML, and it’s my Web page, to automatically search for my favorite television show. We get a lot of people exposed to us through their peers, who wouldn’t have ever encountered any of the marketing that we do.

Another example is a story that we ran — I’m still sort of surprised by the reaction it’s gotten — called “My Parents Are Undercover Square Dancers.” It was by one of our students who wrote about how his parents had long been passionate square dancing fans but didn’t really want people to know. That story has gotten more reprint requests than anything else we’ve written on the site in a year. We get a lot of requests from square dancing newsletters in various Web sites. “Can we reprint your story?” “Can we tell people about your site?” The obvious answer is yes, because peer recommendations are often one of the most powerful ways of communicating your message to other people.

It’s the “Hey, these folks are just like me” attitude, and the sites that do that well will be the sites that succeed.

Secondly, I would encourage you to allow users to shape their experience. You can do this in a number of ways. We’ve enabled users to customize their environment in terms of how various things are displayed. We tried to build features that had dynamic responses based upon the information supplied by the users. One of the features on the site is called “Yenta.” It’s the Student.Net Matchmaker. Based upon information that users supply, it matches other users up as potential dates. That’s the perfect example of users providing us with information that enhances the functionality of their visit to Student.Net, and provides us with the necessary information we need to customize the site and continue to design it so it’s most appropriate.

Finally, I’d encourage you to think about designing your production system for maximum flexibility. Building your site out of databases that can be easily customized using server-side includes for various templates and parsing your pages based upon the browser and location that users are coming from will vastly enhance the user’s experience at your site.

I would encourage you to extend your offline product, if you have one, by taking advantage of new technologies. If anyone followed the press coverage of the New York Times Web site launch, very few articles were written about how great it was that you could read all the New York Times online everyday, and almost all of them focused on the fact that you could do the crossword online. It’s that type of “gee whiz” feature that people really seem to gravitate to.

Also, if you think about newspapers, that in the early days of the Web, used to print these regular columns with a vast number of Web sites to check out in the URLs, they really missed an opportunity to build an “early mover” advantage for their Web sites. If newspapers had been smart and said, “Today’s sites are featured on this Web site, this page on our Web site, and gotten users in the habit of going to the newspaper Web site to check out various sites that they’d read about in the newspaper, I would seriously question whether Yahoo would ever have happened. So in terms of an opportunity lost, I think that’s been a tremendous one.

Next, I’d encourage you to create what I call a “force of habit through frequent updates.” Our site is designed so that when users supply information through a personal section we have on the page, they need to come back to the site to see whether they’ve gotten new messages or new matches. This is something that can really be applied to a lot of sites, that you want to get your users, for lack of a better word, “addicted” to your Web site to the point where they need it. They need to come back several times a day, and they’re exposed to the new content that you put out. Advertisers will demand sites that are designed to encourage repeat visits, because that will increase the effectiveness and the exposure that the advertisers’ ads receive.

Finally, I just thought I would talk about a few other sites that get it so far, and I would encourage you all to check them out. I’m not connected to the Internet for this presentation, but one of the surprising ones that most of you, I’m sure looking at this audience, has never checked out, is a site called “Video Game Spot,” which is a site all about new video games. It has a perfect model in that every day it posts new reviews of video games, new previews, information about price cuts and all sorts of other video-game-related information from user tips and pictures of the games. But they’ve done something that’s really interesting. They have a page for each video game where they allow users to review the games.

What you see is three options presented to you when you look at a video game page. The first is the “Video Game Spot Review.” You have the option of looking at a professionallyrated review. Then they have links to user written reviews so you can see what people who are like you might like, and what other users think of it. Then finally, they put the company information online, so it’s all the promotional material from the company. You really get all the different perspectives that can let you evaluate the various games, and it gives you a sense that if you felt strongly about a game, you could participate as well.

The other sites each have different elements of what I’ve been talking about. MacInTouch is a site that combines all sorts of information about Macs and software for Macs. It’s a digest form created by a few people who started doing it just on their own, and it’s been so successful that they’ve turned it into a business. They compiled links to all the other Mac information several times throughout the day. For instance, when the Apple/NeXT merger was announced, they had an amazing amount of traffic because it was all there. People know that it’s there, and they know the people who run it. They’ve really done a great job of capturing personality.

News.com is a c|net site that covers the Internet. They’ve done a very good job in terms of being a resource for their users and providing frequent updates. If you haven’t visited that site, I’d really encourage you to. Firefly is a site that you’ll hear more about later today, I think. It’s a site that uses collaborative filtering technology developed at MIT to enhance relationships between users for music and movie reviews. It rates the movies that you’re interested in and compares it to the movies that other people have said they’re interested in. It says, “Hey, these are movies that these people who like the same sorts of movies as you’ve liked also like, go check them out.” I’d encourage you, if you have a chance, to go see that presentation and to visit that site.

Finally, for more information, you can feel free to contact me at this address. Also, if you want to leave me your business card, I’d be happy to send you a copy of this presentation. I guess I’d like to close with making an announcement that today, after 16 months of running this on our own, we’re pleased to be able to announce that we just received our first major investment. So, thank you very much.

As the White House leads a campaign to lower underage smoking rates by placing sweeping restrictions on cigarette advertising, giddy anti-smoking activists hope to stub out the tobacco industry’s on-line efforts before they can take root. But tobacco companies have started to claim their little acre of the Internet.

Nearly 37 percent of on-line Americans are under the age of 18, according to a study commissioned by HotWired, the on-line version of Wired magazine. That’s the same age group that President Clinton said on Aug. 10 he wants to keep the tobacco industry from reaching.

While his proposals would ban everything from color magazine advertisements to logos on product giveaways, on-line ads have been overlooked.

Four federal agencies say they are investigating the issue. But none is sure which agency has jurisdiction over on-line tobacco ads - or if any of them do. Rules and regulations written for a different time have not translated well to the Information Age. More importantly, the global nature of the Internet may render Washington’s regulatory actions worthless.

Although the tobacco companies insist they have no plans to advertise on the Internet, both Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds Tobacco, the nation’s two largest tobacco companies, have taken steps toward establishing an on-line presence. And computer records indicate that Philip Morris may be preparing an on-line site built around its Parliament cigarette brand.

"We’re concerned. So many kids are out there. And the federal agencies don’t seem to know how to regulate it," said Makani Themba, associate director of the Marin Institute, which monitors marketing by alcohol and tobacco industries. "They say they are committed to preventing youth access. They should not want to be on-line if there are so many kids on-line."

Philip Morris and RJR have staked claims to Internet addresses. The addresses, which are known as domain names, help the computers that make up the Internet guide electronic mail messages to the proper recipients and help World Wide Web surfers find the home pages they’re seeking.

Those addresses are handed out on a first-come, first-served basis by InterNIC, a Herndon, Va., non-profit agency.

Philip Morris has received five distinct domain names so far and RJR has received three, InterNIC records indicate. Both companies say the addresses were registered as a pre-emptive measure, to prevent critics or competitors from using the names, and not for on-line advertising.

"We haven’t even been discussing the idea of Internet advertising," RJR spokeswoman Peggy Carter said.

"What we have done is registered trademarks and other names not for offensive reasons but defensive ones," Philip Morris spokeswoman Karen Daragan said. "We have no current plans to use it for brand communications."

But unlike RJR, whose three names are variations on the letters RJR, Philip Morris has taken defensive measures one step further.

Four of its names are abbreviations and variations of Philip Morris. But the fifth address is parliament.com, a reference to its Parliament brand of cigarettes.

The first four are connected to the Internet through computers at UUNet Technologies Inc., a national Internet access provider, according to records filed with InterNIC by Philip Morris.

But the parliament.com address is connected through computers at Leo Burnett, Philip Morris’ longtime ad agency.

That leads industry watchers to suspect that Philip Morris plans to launch an on-line site around the Parliament brand.

"We know they’ve reserved space," Themba said. "I think they’re waiting to see if politically they can step out. We hope they don’t."

Daragan said that Philip Morris set up the records that way "because, to register for a name, you need a web site. Leo Burnett has one and we don’t."

But although there are many requirements to register domain names, having a web site is not one of them, according to InterNIC rules.

A possible Parliament site is in keeping with Philip Morris’ apparent corporate strategy for Internet use. The company’s Kraft Foods subsidiary recently reserved 133 domain names, including grapenuts.com and velveeta.com.

Parliament was Philip Morris’ seventh best-selling brand in the United States last year, with sales of 3.21 billion cigarettes, up from 2.99 billion in 1993.

An on-line Parliament site could feature special promotions and giveaways for Internet users, as well as traditional advertisements. Many companies have used Internet giveaways to collect demographic data on its customers.

An on-line site could be particularly valuable because of the Internet’s global reach. Both cigarette sales and Internet use are booming internationally.

The tobacco companies have long conceded the Internet to anti-smoking groups, which have turned it into a powerful lobbying and rallying tool. In fact, Philip Morris admits that it registered only the Parliament brand because site names using its other brands had already been picked off.

"The antis and others have taken the other brand names," Daragan said.

Also, all sorts of anti-smoking studies and documents are on-line, including more than 4,000 pages of leaked internal Brown & Williamson papers on nicotine research. More than 65,000 computer users have read the papers since a California court allowed the documents to go on-line July 1.

The tobacco companies admit they are considering using the Internet to try to rally their supporters. An on-line site could be used to post information and research, coordinate smokers’ rights groups and communicate with those interested in the industry.

But the companies may not be allowed to create an on-line presence.

The Clinton administration’s proposals, which could take effect as early as November if the tobacco industry fails in its efforts to block the regulations in court, could be construed to apply to on-line advertisements, industry watchers say.

"I imagine if there were on-line areas that have substantial underage use, they might be affected," said Kathy Mulvey, research director for INFACT, a corporate accountability activist group in Boston.

"So far, it’s been a low-tech debate," Tobacco Institute spokesman Tom Lauria said. "But I can’t imagine [Food and Drug Administration Commissioner] David Kessler overlooking any form of censorship."

But even the agencies that are supposed to be implementing the new regulations as well as existing ones are not sure whether they will apply to the Internet or whether they even have the authority to set them up that way.

Officials at the Federal Trade Commission referred calls about on-line advertising to the U.S. Department of Justice, which referred calls to the Federal Communications Commission, which referred questions back to Justice. At the White House, calls on the issue were directed to the Food and Drug Administration, where officials did not have an answer either. They referred calls back to the FTC.

While such exchanges are comical, they illustrate the real dilemma federal officials face in trying to enforce rules meant for television and print media in an on-line world.

While many sites like Netscape Communications Corp. already refuse on-line tobacco ads, and programs that allow parents to block certain material are available, some suggest that new legislation may be needed to prevent on-line tobacco ads from reaching minors.

But even an act of Congress would not be enough to thwart a tobacco company intent on advertising on-line.

The Internet is not really a network in the traditional sense, but a network of smaller networks. More than half of those networks are located outside the United States.

Because the physical locations of computers that direct information are inconsequential - borders are meaningless on the Internet - a site set up in another country can be available anywhere in the United States. For instance, a number of sites focused on gambling have been created overseas to circumvent government restrictions here, leading others to suggest that tobacco companies could do the same.

Or at least that’s what Dennis Buettner is hoping.

Buettner, a self-described "idea man" who lives in Severna Park, Md., and works as a network controller for NASA, reserved the addresses cigarette.com and cigarettes.com. He has written letters to every cigarette manufacturer offering to either rent the names to them or handle the on-line marketing himself.

"With the restrictions on tobacco advertising, people are going to be looking for different ways to market their products," Buettner said. "I figure if you have a good domain name, then people who want cigarettes will type it in.

"I read the articles about how they are planning to restrict tobacco advertising and thought, ‘How un-American.’ I don’t know much about the ads. But my thought is, what about freedom?"

Microsoft Windows 95, possibly the most heavily promoted computer product ever, officially went on sale throughout the Triangle at midnight.

The newest version of Microsoft’s highly successful operating system should make personal computers easier to set up and use. Windows 95 will include better audio and video capabilities, and offer easy access to the Internet through the Microsoft Network, the company’s new online service.

Seven to nine million copies are expected to be sold this week alone, according to market research firm Dataquest Inc. Another 20 million copies should be sold by the end of the year.

And those figures may be dwarfed next year. Concerned about possible bugs in the system, many users are expected to wait for a later version of Windows 95 before plunking down $90 for a copy. Also, sellers of computer systems and hardware are expected to see a sales spurt as users realize they need new, or at least upgraded, systems to run the new program.

But Microsoft isn’t leaving things to chance. It is spending $200 million on the launch, which has riveted the world’s attention. The purchase of the first copy — by a student in Auckland, New Zealand, seventeen hours before copies went on sale in the United States — drew extensive news coverage. More than 70,000 people are expected to attend launch events in 43 cities today. Microsoft paid a reported $4 million to license the rights to the Rolling Stones song "Start Me Up" for Windows 95 commercials.

Windows 95, like all operating systems, is the software that determines how files are stored and different programs interact. The Microsoft empire was built on MS-DOS, the operating system that became the industry standard when IBM selected it in 1981 for its first personal computer. The two partners went their separate ways in 1985 when Microsoft introduced the original version of Windows, while IBM bet on an operating system known as OS/2 as a successor to DOS.

Windows found a following, but sales of OS/2 have languished. Nearly 80 percent of the world’s personal computers now run Microsoft operating software.

OS/2 may not be the only casualty. For many months, Windows 95 was known to the computer world only by its code name, "Chicago." But it might have better been named "William Tell," for Windows 95 could be an Apple-killer.

Windows 95 is supposed to make your PC more like a Macintosh. And some industry experts predict it may put the Macintosh out of business. With new features like longer file names and "plug-and-play" technology, a PC for the first time approaches the ease of use that made Macintoshes famous — but at a far lower cost.

Retailers such as Egghead Software in Cary started selling the software as soon as their clocks struck — or, in this digital age, beeped — midnight.

Tim Brown, an automation specialist at the Wake County Public Safety department, has paid $10 at Babbages in Cary Towne Center to reserve his copy.

"I’ll probably go pick it up in the afternoon," he said. "When people ask me whether it’s worth it, at least I’ll have some firsthand experience."

Egghead opened at 11 p.m. Wednesday to give customers a chance to browse. Then at midnight, copies went on sale. With Microsoft’s estimated installation time of 45 to 60 minutes, Triangle computer users could have had the software up and running by 1 a.m.

"We’ve had midnight madness events before and had very good turnout," Egghead manager Joe Mauk said Wednesday. "I really expect the store will be bursting at the seams. There may even be a line to get in."

More than 500 people have reserved copies so far, Mauk said. He had his full staff of 14 on hand until a 2 a.m. close. He plans to reopen the store at 7 this morning and stay on the job until 10 p.m.

As part of the launch, Microsoft will throw an invitation-only bash today featuring an hour long satellite address by CEO Bill Gates that will be seen by several hundred Triangle business executives and software developers at the Raleigh Civic and Convention Center.

"For all the hype we’ve heard, this is a good chance to actually see it," said Doug Haynes, a spokesman for Centura Bank in Rocky Mount, which will demonstrate online banking services that it plans to offer with Microsoft.

Other publicity stunts are a little more … … well, innovative.

Passengers flying from RDU to London should be sure to keep close to their airplane’s windows. Microsoft has painted fields in England with the Windows 95 logo so that they are visible from the air.

Four thousand boxes of Cracker Jacks will be given away with Windows 95 prizes inside in Chicago. The mayor of Fort Worth, Texas, will "officially upgrade" the city to Windows 95 in a ceremony today. Microsoft will pay for the entire press run of the Times of London — which will contain a Windows advertisement on the front page — and will give it away free, the first time in the newspaper’s history.

In New York, the Empire State Building will be lit in Microsoft colors this evening. In Toronto, the city’s tallest building, the CN Tower, will boast a 300-foot high Windows 95 banner. In Poland, journalists will be taken down in submarines to show them what it’s like to live "in a world without Windows."

The launch has become so much of an international event that Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau issued a statement protesting delays in a special French Canadian version.

"We want to be there for the revolution," an aide told Bloomberg Business News. "And we want to be able to do it in our own language."

Until a few weeks ago, however, it wasn’t certain that the revolution would happen.

Microsoft first announced that the software would ship last year. As the company repeatedly pushed back the launch date, analysts began to wonder publicly whether the product was "vaporware," or software that is announced — usually to deter a competitor — but never reaches the market. An oft-repeated joke was that by the time it was ready, Windows 95 would have to be renamed Windows 96.

Then the Department of Justice threatened to intervene to stop distribution. Regulators were concerned that Microsoft had an unfair advantage in the online service market by making its online access available through Windows 95. The Microsoft Network is expected to draw 9 million users, almost triple the subscribers of CompuServe, the largest online service.

But the feds decided to not delay the rollout, and it came off on schedule. Although the anticipated reception has made Microsoft executives happy, it likely will make computer hardware manufacturers even happier.

To take advantage of the features, users will need more muscular computers than most of them now possess.

At least 39 percent of PC users will have to upgrade their computers to run Windows 95, according to a recent survey, and another 22 percent have barely enough power to enjoy its full benefits.

Virtually the only institution unimpressed with the hoopla was Wall Street. Microsoft stock closed at $97.875, down $1.438, in Nasdaq trading Wednesday.

He doesn’t have to worry about what his co-workers might think. Since July, he’s worked by himself, in an office above his garage.

When Jones agreed to leave his job at a Raleigh law firm to join a Columbia, S.C., company as vice president for business development, he insisted that he be allowed to remain in the Triangle.

"I didn’t want to move to Columbia," Jones says. "I can make an argument that, with the type of work I do, I’m more productive here than in an office with the distractions."

So he added a few phone lines to his garage and joined the burgeoning ranks of telecommuters, people who use technology to work from home or away from their traditional offices.

For employees, telecommuting offers the chance to bypass rush-hour traffic, to spend time with their families and to work at their own pace without managers hovering over them.

For employers, telecommuting cuts down on office overhead and costly corporate real estate.

Some 9.1 million employees worked at home during business hours for at least one day per month last year, up from 7.6 million the year before, according to FIND/SVP, an Ithaca, N.Y., research firm.

Work-at-home arrangements aren’t for everyone, employers and workplace consultants warn. An employee, of course, has to maintain a good supply of self-discipline. And for employers, telecommuting loses its appeal as a productivity booster if managers don’t trust home-workers or refuse to offer the necessary support to make it work.

Although the Triangle does not have the same traffic pressures inspiring telecommuting as cities like Los Angeles, it is slowly taking hold here nonetheless.

Some big employers such as IBM Corp. are giving increasing numbers of employees the chance to work at home. Computer retailers say their fastest-growing segment is the "soho," or small office/home office market. And even phone companies and office furniture retailers are beginning to capitalize on the trend.

Within a few months, GTE South, which has run local advertisements encouraging people to telecommute, will offer new service options for telecommuters, including connectivity, consulting and support. The local phone provider serves Durham and Research Triangle Park.

"GTE is trying to put together a complete package for working at home," says David Bryant, senior network engineer.

As part of the package, GTE will promote high-speed, high-capacity phone lines called ISDN, for integrated services digital network. One ISDN line can support two phone lines, making it ideal for home workers who want one line for voice and one line for a fax machine or modem. Prices range from $50 to $75 month, with a surcharge for data usage.

Triangle office supply stores say they are seeing more orders for home office equipment. Those computers, printers, and fax machines require furniture.

"We have more and more people coming in here saying they are working at home," says Angie Lebitz, showroom manager for Alfred Williams and Co., a Raleigh office supplier. "That’s been happening for at least the past year. We’ve noticed a significant increase."

A typical home office configuration might cost between $2,500 and $3,000, Lebitz said.

But employees who work at home don’t have to bear the full cost of a home office. Some Triangle companies are starting to pick up portions of the tab.

IBM Corp.’s Research Triangle Park operation now pays for phone lines for nearly half of its employees who do some sort of work at home, spokesman Jay Cadmus says.

For employees like Gary Brown, the company sometimes supplies computers, too.

Brown, who provides on-line customer support, has worked out of his home in Cary off and on for 10 years and full time since October.

What he may lose in office camaraderie, he says, he makes up for in productivity. "I’m relaxed, I’ve got music going," Brown says. "There’s no office chit-chat, no telephone ringing, no background noise. It allows you to write more politely.

Or it could be a treacherous and deadly landscape, swallowing up trailblazers and setting in motion costly financial flops.

Welcome to the world of cyberbusiness.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of the Internet as companies in the Triangle rush to go on-line. But, so far, success stories are few and far between as companies tentatively explore the intricacies of Internet commerce.

In fact, many companies have found they are more likely to use the Internet to save money rather than to make money.

"I don’t know of many nontechnology companies that are doing much revenue through the Internet in the area right now," said Cliff Allen, who advises companies on their on-line efforts as president of the Allen Marketing Group in Raleigh.

In the extraordinarily brief commercial life of the Internet, the people who have made money are Internet access providers, World Wide Web page designers and the cottage industry of consultants and speakers.

That’s about to change.

As the Internet moves from the playground of scientists and hackers to a robust business community, this could be the year that real fortunes are made and lost on the Internet.

"More and more people are going to be sitting in their living rooms browsing the Net," said Sarah Gray Lamm, manager of the Home Team Properties Inc., a Chapel Hill real estate company that launched a Web site with property listings last month.

Like most aspects of Internet commerce, market research is an emerging field, and no figures are available for measuring Triangle business activity on the Internet. But total sales on the Internet worldwide from September through July were $118 million, according to a survey of more than 650 Web sites by ActivMedia, Inc., a Peterborough, N.H., research firm. That figure is expected to skyrocket for the next few years.

"There is a novelty feature to ordering flowers or nontechnology merchandise over the Net," Allen said. "But there’s also no competition."

If the Internet has been a rough-and-tumble world so far, a semblance of order is about to arrive, in the form of big business.

Visa and MasterCard have teamed up to develop secure transaction software to prevent hackers from picking off credit card numbers. Several banks are exploring creating cyberbanking divisions. Wall Street has started to pour capital into technology companies.

With these developments comes a new critical mass of users. All the major commercial on-line services have pledged to offer full access to the Web by the end of the year. The newest online service, the much-touted Microsoft Network, could add another 9 million users to the Internet’s estimated population of 30 million users worldwide.

While electronic mail addresses pop up routinely on business cards from Research Triangle Park, more nontechnology companies in the Triangle are now considering establishing a presence online.

"It’s those merchants that are trying to decide whether they need to be up or not," Allen said.

Those Triangle companies that have ventured on-line have found a variety of ways to integrate the Internet into traditional business strategies. And some of them have learned something that Internet business evangelists don’t share very often: Most companies on the Internet aren’t trying to make money - they’re trying to cut costs.

Web sites can save staff and processing time, mailing and printing costs, and even long-distance phone bills, especially for calls overseas.

For instance, American Airlines, which launched its site May 18, has placed flight schedules on-line and plans to allow frequent fliers to check account information by the end of the year.

Initially, the airline hopes to speed up the reservation process at its five reservation centers, including its 1,400-employee operation in Cary.

"The concept is really to reduce the cost of business as much as possible," said Joe Crawley, the site’s webmaster.

Far more important are American’s plans to offer electronic booking of flights early next year.

In an industry where commissions to travel agents are the third-highest cost after labor and fuel, electronic booking could increase the number of tickets issued directly by the airlines, now just 20 percent. One day electronic booking could supplant reservation centers and travel agencies entirely.

Not to be outdone, a number of travel agencies have taken to the Web as well. PCTravel, a service of Raleigh’s American Travel Corp., has perhaps the most sophisticated system. Consumers can search for the cheapest flight and can reserve and buy tickets. PCTravel expects to do $2 million worth of bookings per month for this year, said David Lea, American Travel vice president for marketing.

But a major problem for PCTravel and other Triangle companies that sell goods and services on-line has been the continuing concern over the security of information transmitted over the Internet.

Technological advances in security have been unable to dispel a public distrust fueled, in large part, by the February arrest of hacker Kevin Mitnick in a North Raleigh apartment on charges of stealing 20,000 credit card numbers from the nation’s largest Internet access provider. PCTravel, the Durham Bulls and a number of Triangle businesses have turned to a new cyberbanking unit of First Union Corp. in Charlotte for help.

First Union is providing help for on-line transactions such as credit card verification and transaction security. The company also plans to tackle business-to-business transactions and soon will announce new cash management software that will enable corporate customers to check account information over the Internet.

"We want to be where our customers are," said Tom Kitrick, First Union vice president for strategic planning and Internet marketing. "What’s driving this industry is, how can businesses use the Internet to make their transactions easier?"

Another industry being driven by the Internet is marketing.

The Internet is a marketer’s dream tool. Precise files on individual users can be kept easily. The demographics are to die for. Web users are well off, with an average income of $69,000, and highly educated, with nearly 35 percent having completed college and almost 32 percent more earning an advanced degree, according to a University of Michigan-Georgia Tech study.

At WRAL-FM 101.5, a promotion to give away tickets to the movie "The Net" demonstrated just how powerful a marketing tool the Internet could be.

Listeners were asked to go to its Web site, leave a mailing address, and to fill out an optional survey. The station mentioned the offer on the air just three times in 30 hours.

"We were going to leave it up for a week, figuring we would get 20 responses," said Ned Attayek, an announcer who designed and maintains the page. "We put it up at Monday lunch and by Tuesday suppertime, the tickets were gone."

The station gave away 211 tickets and collected valuable demographic data in the process. And WRAL did it all without devoting staff time or hiring a marketing company to conduct the research.

"We were amazed. We’re trying to figure out how to make some money off this page," Attayek said. "It’s obvious that it’s an incredible marketing and promotion research tool."

It’s also an incredible tool for entrepreneurs like Gary Storr and two co-workers who launched a Web service called America’s Help Wanted to assist companies in their recruiting efforts a month ago. They expect to charge companies to post job openings and to buy resumes of qualified candidates from a searchable database.

"We’re hopeful that we’ll be able to get to a point where we can support this on a full-time basis," Storr said.

Venture capitalists are quite interested in the activities of Storr and entrepreneurs like him.

Internet start-ups received $47 million in venture capital financing in the first quarter of this year, $5 million more than all of 1994, according to a study by Venture One, a San Francisco research company.

Venture capital investments in Internet-related companies are growing about three times as fast as biotech investments did in the late 1980s, said Venture One spokeswoman Caren Cadile.

But before entrepreneurs or established businesses order business cards to go with a new Web site, they should take the time to do some old-fashioned research by spending some time on-line, posting messages and answering questions, Allen cautioned.

"When you get an e-mail asking for your catalog, you’ve found a market. When you get e-mail asking for your Web site, then it’s time to get a Web site," Allen said. "It’s the simplest market research you can do."

You can’t call him at Esquire magazine, though. He doesn’t work there and never has, according to the company. Try some of his other 17 e-mail addresses, including "hertz.com" and "trump.com," and you’ll get the same result. He doesn’t work for those companies either, spokesmen said.

But Cashel does own the words they might want to use in their cyberspace addresses.

Cashel — a Kalorama resident who works at the government-funded Eurasia Foundation here — declined to be interviewed for this article. He is among a growing number of people and companies that have registered hundreds of Internet addresses mimicking some of corporate America’s most fiercely guarded trademarks.

Only with an address can a company send and receive e-mail on "the Net." Just as street signs provide directions to buildings, Internet addresses direct information to the right individual. If your name is Mike and you work at XYZ Corp., your Internet address might be mike@xyz.com. Unless, of course, somebody else had already registered @xyz.com. Then you would have to be mike@elsewhere.com.

The unique addresses are handed out on a first-come, first-served basis by an administrative body called InterNIC. Anyone can register any address for free. The only restrictions are Internet naming guidelines, which limit the number of characters and require that a descriptive suffix be included. All business addresses, for instance, must include the suffix ".com," short for "commercial."

The rush by Cashel and others to register potentially valuable names may cost businesses millions. As more companies venture on-line, they may find their name of choice already has been registered by a speculator, a competitor, an employee or even a company in a different industry with a similar name. At stake is corporate identity in the information age.

Companies whose potential names have been registered by others will have three choices: Pick another name, buy the rights to the original one or sue.

"There are big corporate names being registered, and it appears that it is individuals and not companies who are responsible," said Mike Walsh, the president of Internet Info, a Falls Church market research firm that tracks corporate use of the Net.

Already, 17,000 ".com" names have been registered, and that number may swell to 50,000 a year from now, Walsh said.

A search of InterNIC’s public registry of names reveals several Fortune 500 companies whose names or products have been registered by someone else. Besides Cashel’s names, already taken are "coke.com," "startrek.com," "nasdaq.com," "cosmo.com" and "windows.com." Some companies have reserved scores of addresses that might be valuable someday, such as "pizza.com," "sex.com," "god.com" and "money.com."

Spokesmen for Hertz Corp., the Nasdaq stock market, Viacom Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and other companies and organizations contacted said they were unaware that the names had been registered. Several said the companies would investigate possible legal action to claim the names.

Like many legal issues in cyberspace, there is no clear precedent on whether traditional trademark law protection extends to Internet addresses.

"Addresses are problematic. The trademarks statute forbids the registration of geographic addresses, but computer addresses may not fall within those limitations," said Lynne Beresford, the trademark legal administrator at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

"It’s very much like getting a vanity plate," said Jonathan Groves, manager of information services at the Internet Co., a Cambridge, Mass., Internet provider that registered the Nasdaq and Windows addresses for clients.

Several intellectual property and trademark lawyers said that companies whose names are taken may have pretty strong cases.

"Trademark rights are based upon use. If you make any other use of a name that could confuse the public, that’s trademark infringement," said John Hornick, an attorney who specializes in such matters.

"If you take an Internet address, you’re saying, ‘I’m going to take someone else’s name and register it,’ " he said. "You can certainly argue that might confuse the public, and could probably sue and win."

Merely registering a company’s name could prompt legal action, said Bruce Teller, outside counsel for the International Trademark Association. While not trademark infringement, registering a name could be considered trademark dilution because the commercial value in a name is diminished, he said.

Two cases are in the courts. In one, the MTV cable channel is suing Adam Curry, a former MTV host, over his use of the address "mtv.com." Curry originally offered to set up the address for MTV, but the network declined.

With MTV’s knowledge, Curry registered the name for himself and helped the network incorporate it into MTV programming. Only after Curry tried to stage an on-air resignation in April did MTV file suit to claim the name.

While the matter is in litigation, Curry has agreed to direct to another site users who try to address mtv.com.

Lawyers said the case probably will focus on MTV’s initial decision not to register the name, and not on trademark issues.

In the other case, the Princeton Review test preparation company registered the address "kaplan.com" in reference to its largest competitor, the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center. Although Princeton Review President John Katzman says the registration was a joke, the company activated the address with on-line advertisements for Princeton Review.

Kaplan, which is a unit of The Washington Post Co., filed suit. Kaplan President Jonathan Glayer said the company has since registered "about 20" variations on the Kaplan name and its products. The two companies have agreed to arbitration later in the year; in the meantime, Princeton Review has deactivated kaplan.com.

Princeton Review’s "joke" was certainly an expensive one. Katzman estimates his legal bills will run between $ 10,000 and $ 20,000.

Undeterred, he says he may have another joke in store for Kaplan. He’s considering registering the address "kraplan.com" and promoting it instead.

To avoid ending up in Kaplan’s position, companies can take preventive measures. Katzman himself urges, "Everybody should go out and register their company’s domain name right now."

Other suggestions from lawyers include trademarking an un-stylized company logo — because Internet addresses are plain text, a company’s stylized logo may not be admissible in an infringement case — and collecting evidence that a similar name causes public confusion. Misdelivered e-mail might be one way of documentation, attorney Hornick said.

Most of all, companies should not count on Internet providers to protect a name when someone else tries to register it — because most won’t.

"We can’t act as an arbiter," Internet Co. President Robert Raisch explains. "We would be placed in a position of qualifying every domain name for every country around the world."

Now a growing number of "community" or "civic" computer networks are springing up around the country to tie local people together and hook them into the Internet for free.

Last week, Maryland’s planned state-wide "Sailor" system, which makes the Internet’s so-called gopher services available at no cost, began limited operation in the Baltimore area. Officials hope to start making it available in Washington’s Maryland suburbs in September.

Sailor also will offer subsidized rates — $ 100 per year — for full access to the Internet, which is used by an estimated 20 million people worldwide. Commercial Internet services often charge three times that.

Sailor will join a more established Washington area community network, CapAccess, which in a year and a half has attracted more than 9,000 users by offering electronic-mail connections, limited access to the Internet and other services.

Since 1986 when Case Western Reserve University launched the Cleveland FreeNet, community networks have sprung up in many North American cities. The goal is to foster local communications and make sure that the poor and public service groups aren’t priced out of the electronic future.

They are free in the sense that public television is. People can sign up for nothing, but once aboard they are typically urged to donate money or time. Some services, such as Maryland’s Sailor, receive tax dollars.

"The whole idea of a civic network is new to everybody, including those who think they understand what it means," said Mark Bolgiano, a Greater Washington Board of Trade vice president who is studying a partnership with CapAccess.

"The number of people among our members who know what Internet is is still pretty low," he said. "CapAccess is even harder to understand."

Any area resident with a computer, modem device and communications software can reach CapAccess with a local telephone call. The number is 202-785-1523. Newcomers can log in under the name "guest", using "visitor" as the password.

People who already have Internet connections can reach CapAccess by using the telnet command to reach the address cap.gwu.edu.

Based at George Washington University, the service is geared toward helping users new to "the Net" get up to speed quickly. Instead of grappling with confusing typed commands, they can move around the service by picking numbered options from a menu or by typing shortcuts, such as "go post" to read e-mail.

There are on-line guides to appropriate Net conduct — dubbed "netiquette" — and other hints, such as how to select a good password. For users who would prefer face-to-face help, volunteers conduct free weekend training sessions.

CapAccess has targeted local schools, libraries, governments and social service groups by letting them use the service to promote their activities and collaborate with similar groups. Volunteers will help any such group post information or set up on-line "discussion groups" in which people carry on electronic dialogues.

Arlington County, for instance, has put a government information center on the system. The Montgomery County Public Library put its card catalogue on-line, and the Kennedy Center added performance schedules.

Several local schools put PTA minutes on-line and some churches have started posting sermons. Virginia Sen. Charles S. Robb set up a "virtual office," believed to be the first of its kind, which allows constituents to skim his voting record and official policy statements.

"It’s a good forum for people to look at what Senator Robb has been saying and doing," said Matt McGowan, Robb’s office manager.

The CapAccess experiment has created "new cross-community connections" between governments and community service groups, said CapAccess Executive Director Taylor Walsh.

"If there’s an information resource in Montgomery County that helps people who are homeless, there’s no reason for Arlington or Prince George’s to replicate that database and pay for its implementation if they can get access to it through the network," he said. "We’re already beginning to see that kind of thing happening."

Unlike many computer services, which tend to be used overwhelmingly by white males, the CapAccess user base is a fairly representative sampling of the region. At a recent membership meeting, half of the people attending were women, and almost a third were black. Overall, about 35 percent of CapAccess users are female, Walsh said. Only 10 percent to 15 percent of CompuServe and America Online users are women.

To provide true public access to the system, CapAccess has started a "recycling" campaign to refurbish old computers from corporations and governments and redistribute them to libraries, schools and community centers across the region.

"We need to put access points in the hands of the disadvantaged so [CapAccess] can be a tool for the many, not the few," said attorney Jack Young, a CapAccess volunteer.

Funded initially by grants from the Annenberg/Corporation for Public Broadcasting Projects with technical assistance from George Washington University, CapAccess now relies entirely on donations and volunteers such as Young to cover its $ 300,000 in annual costs.

This collaboration could serve as a model for national networks, users say.

"We are doing exactly what the government wants to do," said the Rev. Fred Williams, a board member. "Our ‘family’ is building a better community through technology. What we’re doing is replicable and exportable throughout the whole country."