net surf Edited by Kristin Spence GeoCities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier GeoCities is never quite what it appears to be.Touted as the 10th largest consumer Web site by marketing godzilla PC-Meter, GeoCities spins like a beckoning Starship Enterprise of simultaneous individu-ality and commonality. And it holds a treasure trove of promotional stuff:dumb flea-market things like GeoCities caps, hokey things like birthday greetings, valuable things like homepages megs of which you get free> - you'll find all forms of conspicuous consumables here. Which is why 240,000 so-called homesteaders have built homepages within GeoCities' virtual microclimates. Dig deeper and GeoCities becomes a pioneering Paul Bunyan of an outpost in cyberspace, a munificent world that attempts to be all things to all people. GeoCities is what the Web is all about: dreams for a better virtual life. Have a mansion in lusty Hollywood even though you live in Belgium.Travel to virtual Vienna to discover megaclassical music MIDI sites. Become a homesteader and move into one of 29 cybercities, where you can live and love, build and set down roots. GeoCities seems poised to become the first moneymaking VVeb-venture known to geeks. Of course, the omnipresent extraterrestrials of advertising exist here, but somehow, they're more subtle, rnore acceptable. Advertisers are treated like John Cheeverish new neigh-bors who will do anything to fit in.

But homesteaders are treated with megarespect, and they respond by coming pretty damn close to cre-ating the mythic comrnunity everyone always talks about but never quite actualizes. Though initial GeoCity homepage attempts were annoyingly primi-tive, the last six months have witnessed a full genetic transformation. The homepage-happy denizens are into raucous creativity now.Wit-ness The Mona Mailart Show project (www.geocities.com/SoHo/702.2,, where villagers submit graphic parodies of the wry DaVinci diva. Here, all your knowledge of fine art morphs into a renaissance Italian cabaret, old chum. Regard The Mona Liza, in which the elusive Mona becomes a plastic-surgery-poster-girl-Broadway-show-tune crooner. Or perhaps the Mona Lisa as busty Marilyn in a checked bikini. Even if this isn't the highest tech stuff, these mavens do a lot with their 2 megs. Although there's a preponderance of talk about drink-ing at the BourbonStreet community, an Australian known as reefR creates a fairly funny page of drinking games and history lwww.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/1053/1.There's even a Reservoir Dogs game where (gasp, you have to quaff libation every time a character uses the f word. At Sunsetstrip, oddly, there's a megapage about the terrific and culty New York antifolk singer Brenda Kahn (www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/64804, with a Brenda crossword puz-zle for her few thousand motley but rabid fans.

<rando gifs like a real GeoCities page> GeoCities beckons with everything from MotorCity (an ideal subdivision if, say, Bobby LaBonte is your pedal-to-the-metal hero) to Soho (a beatnik paradise,. But GeoCities, of course, isn't a real community:there's no suicide, sex, drugs, or murder. It's not the utopian planet of perfection, either. But right now, it's the best use of the Web by a group of regularJanes and Joes.There are no Internet geeks, no intranet techheads, just people who love their computers and desperately need to communi-cate a sense of place.- Harold Goldberg (mediacur,,aol.com)