DIGITAL L.A. : DO A LITTLE SITE-SEEING; THE BATTLE BEGINS FOR L.A. SURFERS.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

Getting around Los Angeles may get easier in the near future, thanks to the debut of one city directory site and the revamping of another.

With a big party in, of all places, Santa Monica, a new Los Angeles-oriented Web site debuted recently. With any luck, LA.com (at www.la.com) will be around awhile, because the site has some good resources to offer for those of us living in and around the City of Angels.

The Sherman Oaks-based company has partnered with L.A. Weekly, Variety and Comedy.com to provide an array of entertainment, dining and lifestyle-oriented material, the sort of stuff that's common on city directory sites.

But LA.com also offers such offbeat additions as a wedding planner site, travel and hotel connections; auto dealers; chat rooms; a dating service; gossip and legal columnists; local news; information about high school athletes; traffic reports; area radio stations; coming conventions and attractions; and even free e-mail with the LA.com address.

``Basically, it's everything that's L.A.,'' said LA.com producer Adam Rogas. ``It's an all-encompassing city guide for L.A. and the area, moving a little into Orange County and some nearby resorts.''

The company's owners recently sold off their first city guide, Vegas.com, to start LA.com, said president David Ezra. Proceeds from that sale are financing the new venture and a planned similar venture in Hawaii.

LA.com is taking on some of the same territory that Microsoft has been trying to cover over the past two years with its Sidewalk service, which recently was revamped.

Sidewalk (www.sidewalk.com) has concentrated on local arts and entertainment information in nine cities, including San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle, though not Los Angeles.

Though its sites have been busy, Microsoft is now expanding them to be useful to people who don't live in the nine Sidewalk cities, Sidewalk product manager Gayle Troberman said.

``People love Sidewalk as far as it goes,'' Troberman said. ``But there's a whole other set of decisions people have to make. There's a universal sense of not having enough time to get things done.''

The big addition is consumer information on a wide variety of durable goods and products in categories such as home electronics, sports equipment, cars and computers. Sidewalk features buyers' guides, reviews and links to local and online sellers of those goods, said Moya Gollaher, Sidewalk's San Diego site general manager.

``There's no one good place to do consumer homework on purchases that might affect other people (such as family) other than yourself,'' Troberman said. ``We can solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.''

It's a Wired, Wired, Wired Wired world

It sounded a bit like the recent Apple Computer commercials honoring ``the dreamers and the doers,'' but there was no arguing with who Wired magazine chose to spotlight for its Wired 25 in a party this week in a stunning mansion atop a ridge in Silver Lake.

The event included many of the 25 ``dreamers, inventors, mavericks, leaders'' whom the magazine chose to spotlight for their visionary attempts to change the way the world works.

The list includes the well-known (Apple CEO Steve Jobs, billionaire philanthropist George Soros, Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi), the techno-evangelists (Gutenberg Project founder Michael Hart, spread-spectrum radio champion Dave Hughes), the scientists (geneticist Reinhold Rau, quantum computing's David Deutsch), even smart machines (the Honda P3 robot, artificial intelligence pioneer Doug Lenat's Cyc).

It also includes some Hollywood players, such as Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau and movie director Robert Altman, who are collaborating on a TV show about the computer business, and Disney Online president Jake Winebaum.

``I don't know if they're going down (in history) as a genius or a crackpot,'' Wired editor Kevin Kelly said of the honorees. ``Sometimes even trying is enough to change the world.''

Disney fellow Danny Hillis also spoke at the party, quoting management guru Peter Drucker: ``He said people who are monomaniacs, who are trying to change the world, are almost certainly doomed to failure. He then went on to point out that everybody else is doomed to failure as well.''

The magazine, which was recently bought by Conde Nast, seems to have been in a list-making mode in recent issues. In October, it picked the people influencing Hollywood's future, concentrating on the digital-effects people who are making synthespians and computer-generated images part of the new reality while proclaiming Steven Spielberg ``boring.''

Among the local figures tabbed by Wired were:

Special-effects supercouple Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak, whose Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co. has a Hollywood office. Kleiser, who attended the Wired 25 party, said his company has just about completed work on Universal Studios' smashing new Spiderman ride in Orlando, Fla.

Tomlinson Holman, a University of Southern California professor who has turned his influential work on movie sound into his own company, THM Corp., with a desktop system that reproduces a movie's audio the way it sounds in a theater.

Ken Williams, who heads Sony Pictures Entertainment's in-house special-effects house.

What was interesting to note, however, was how many of the Hollywood 3.0 list were people whose companies aren't anywhere near Los Angeles. The implications for the region's economy and primacy in entertainment are worth pondering.

Bowie wants your song lyrics

David Bowie is undergoing yet another transformation these days, this time into an Internet music pioneer.

Not only is he the first rock star to create his own Internet service provider (so you can have his name in your e-mail address), he now is running a contest on his Web site (at www.davidbowie.com) where fans can help finish a song he has partially completed.

Bowie has written all of the music, and the lyrics for the chorus. Help him finish the lyrics, and you can earn songwriting credit and eternal fame. A link at the site allows you to hear the half-done song.

Bowie also is one of several artists creating online music ``channels,'' consisting of 100 to 200 favorite songs from their own catalog and those of musicians who influenced them, said Brett Atwood, RealNetworks' editor of music services.

Typically, the artists also are taping comments, explaining their choices, to be played between songs, Atwood said. The channels are popping up all over the Internet as a way to draw fans to Web sites.

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Photo: no caption (David Bowie)