CANDIDATES CAST THE NET : CYBERSPACE THE FINAL FRONTIER FOR THIS YEAR'S OFFICE SEEKERS.

Byline: David Plotnik Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Let us consider for a moment that peculiar rite of passage known as the seventh-grade dance. This ostensibly social event, the first of its kind in many a young life, often is greeted with a mix of mystification and dread.

Nobody knows exactly what they're supposed to do, yet still they go - because everyone else is going. The mission: Show up, be seen and, above all else, avoid embarrassment. Oh yeah - try to look like you're having fun.

Like seventh-graders, the intrepid candidates who've chosen to venture into the wired arena this election season deserve our pity and forbearance. For most of them, this is their first slow dance in cyberspace, and they're simply trying to keep those little feet moving.

Thanks in large part to the exponential growth in the World Wide Web during the past two years, just about any candidate with a kilobyte of ambition now feels compelled to have a Net presence. Rubber chicken dinners, lawn signs and Labor Day picnics are still the staples of the game, but these days, you're nobody until somebody bookmarks your home page.

So what if the Web affords only a fraction of the market reach provided by direct mail and television? It's a gesture, a message writ large in HTML: ``Hey, I get it.''

But who really does get it? Those who do, use the Web to complement, not duplicate, their other campaign efforts.

They recognize it as a tool to build hypertext bridges to allied camps. They use the unique two-way nature of the medium to create a feeling of community among the faithful. And they understand the necessity of serving up entertainment alongside information.

The ones who don't get it take the shovelware approach, dumping warmed-over press releases and recycled brochure material onto their sites with little thought to whether it works on the small screen or not. Digital campaigning still may be in its infancy, but even now, you won't get far by uploading an apple pie recipe, some snapshots of the kids and an animated GIF of an American flag.

In the short run, those who stand to gain the most by doing battle in the new arena are those who find themselves marginalized by the economic realities of traditional campaigning.

It doesn't matter if you lack a six-figure war chest for network time. It doesn't matter if the debate organizers laughed you right out of the hall. It doesn't matter if you're running your campaign out of a U-Haul trailer and financing it with recycled beer cans.

If you've got $30 a month for Web-server space and a canny 15-year-old for a Web master, the electronic soapbox allows you to stand toe-to-wingtipped-toe with the big boys, more or less.

To get some idea how effectively candidates are using the new medium, let's take a quick, critical barnstorming tour through some of the presidential campaign sites:

http://www.dolekemp96.org

Spend a few minutes at the main site for the Dole/Kemp campaign and you may come away wondering if Clinton is really the slick one in this race. Cyberspacially speaking, the Dole campaign doesn't miss a trick.

First-time visitors are urged to customize the site, which is jammed with Shockwave and RealAudio content. Under that guise, the Dole folks gather three screens of mailing list data.

Furthermore, before you hit the site proper, you're urged to sign up for any of 30 coalitions and put yourself on an e-mail list for campaign updates.

The custom front page of Dole news and views, tailored to your interests and your state, is cool - but it's still asking a lot of casual surfers. The interactive section has more fun activities than a 3-year-old's Busy Box: Make a button, make a poster, send an electronic postcard or download Dole wallpaper for your own site.

They could do even more in the fun department. I'd like to see them counterspin Dole's ``mean factor'' with a ``mean meter'' that would show just how nasty the candidate is feeling on any given day.

On the downside, the site lacks the touch of real folks. Instead of an American quilt jammed with faces and voices from Anchorage to Albuquerque, this feels like a piece of whole cloth, expertly tailored inside the Beltway.

http://www.cg96.org

The main Clinton/Gore site will yield just about the same content mix as that of his main opponent, but with 17 buttons on the main screen (about two times too many), it takes work to find the good stuff. Fortunately, the site is searchable by state or topic.

The Clinton/Gore site has precisely the element Dole's lacks: a chorus of heartland voices, dubbed America's Home Page, devoted to singing Clinton's praises. And while Dole gathered all his visitor data at the front end, the Clinton folks have potential points-of-interaction sprinkled throughout the site, a more subtle approach.

On the downside, both the downloadable-goodies page and the volunteers page repeatedly crashed my Netscape 3.0 browser. Think twice before going there.

Also, the fun factor is all but nonexistent. The campaign could do a much better job capitalizing on the incumbent's natural edge in superior daily photo ops. The wooden shots of legislators and bureaucrats sitting around talking just don't cut it.

Ideally, the campaign would outfit Clinton with one of those wildlife tracking bracelets biologists use to monitor caribou migration and the like. That way, at any hour, Netizens would be able to dial into the site and, through the magic of global-positioning satellites, see exactly where the chief executive is at the moment.

Overall, the Clinton/Gore production is a serviceable site, light on cutting-edge multimedia extensions and featuring just the right ratio of warm, fuzzy stuff to white papers.

http://www.perot.org

Ross Perot, who talked a blue streak about digital direct democracy four years ago, appears to be making a go of it here, in limited fashion. The individual state pages give a disarmingly candid, behind-the-scenes look at how a grass-roots campaign operates.

The earnest chatter about lawn signs and petition parties should serve as a reminder that the volunteer armies of all campaigns, from school board to the highest offices in the land, all function in more or less the same manner. You'll find the requisite forms for interaction - a four-screen opinion survey and a page for volunteers and donations.

As for entertainment, the giant sucking sound you hear is all the fun flowing somewhere else. There's nothing even remotely cutesy or frivolous about Perot or his campaign.

On a minor positive note, Perot was the only one of the majors with the good sense to provide an AOL Lite viewing option for the browser-impaired folks connecting via America Online.

http://www.HarryBrowne96.org

Harry Browne, the Libertarian candidate for president, has at least six official and semiofficial sites promoting himself and his book. This main site, an ungainly everything-but-the-kitchen-sink muddle of links, is thoroughly underwhelming.

Compared to his competitors, Browne scores high on information density (with links to seemingly every position paper he's issued in the past decade) and very low on spirit. Even his daily campaign journal, the best thing about the site, often comes across as bland, gray and moribund.

It's simply unfathomable that the Libertarians, whose laissez-faire values appear to be most in line with the nascent culture of the Net itself, could fail to bang the gong here - and bang it hard. In Browne, you have a candidate who's an absolute defender of free speech and cyber-rights, yet the casual reader would never know it were it not for the de rigueur free-speech ribbon on the page. Browne should have the home-field advantage in cyberspace, and instead he comes off as being as clueless as all the rest.

http://www.hagelin.org

John Hagelin, the standard-bearer for the Natural Law Party, seems earnest although a tad vague in his pitch for ``prevention-oriented government.'' A voter unfamiliar with the origins and platform of the Natural Law Party would have to scratch pretty hard through two layers of red and blue type before seeing the words ``Transcendental Meditation.''

Like the others, this guy is no fun at all. Hagelin and his running mate, Mike Tompkins, look about as radical as a couple of shoe salesmen at a Moose lodge meeting. Coming from a party that preaches the reduction of stress on a mass scale, these guys would do well to loosen up a little.

http://www.rahul.net/cameron/nader

This unofficial Ralph Nader for president page (I couldn't find an official one) speaks volumes about Nader's relationship with the Green Party. It's right there on the front page: Nader won't talk to campaign organizers. He won't accept donations. And if you ask for his platform, he'll hand you a four-year-old progressive manifesto titled ``The Concord Principles.''

There is no campaign itinerary. No greeting statement from Nader. No way to interact with him. (One gets the distinct impression Mr. ``Unsafe At Any Speed'' doesn't even care to interact with the Greens much.) Overall, a telling nonstatement from a seemingly ambivalent noncandidate.

http://www.lightspeed.net/tehachapi/constitu/constitu. htm

The Constitution Party probably will not be represented on your local ballot this time around - or any time, for that matter. Nonetheless, it's in the Lost Cause Department that we find proof for the theorem that anyone can mount a presidential campaign on the Web.

To wit: Constitutional presidential candidate Gina Deane resembles a troll with purple hair. Her running mate, Donal Kirchberg, doubles as the campaign's Web master.

For the record, this is the only presidential campaign page with a set of UFO links. (This should be a tremendous help to those who are planning to submit absentee ballots from another solar system.) Alas, there is no mention of the party's stand on illegal aliens.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Cyberspacially speaking, Bob Dole's campaigndoesn't miss a trick. First-time visitors are urged to customize the site, and under that guise, the Dole folks gather three screens of mailing list data.

(2) The Clinton/Gore site has precisely the element Dole's lacks: a chorus of heartland voices, dubbed America's Home Page, devoted to singing Bill Clinton's praises.

Associated Press