DIGITAL L.A. : STEP RIGHT UP, FOLKS, TO BRANSON'S BIG TOP.

Byline: David Bloom 

With a contortionist, trapeze, spotlights, magician, performing Seal (the musician, not the marine mammal) and one quite prominent ringmaster in Richard Branson, the recent Virgin Megastore Online kickoff party in Hollywood had all the trappings of a circus.

But it'll take more than an entertaining opening act to keep them coming back to this show.

Branson, the flamboyant Virgin founder, has been slow to the online world, and coy about why: ``We were (Internet) virgins, and virgins have to be courted a little longer than those who are not virgins.''

Branson has ambitious plans for the site (at www.virginmega.com, though it will soon go to www.virgin.com). He wants to overlay a massive selection of music, videos, books and video games with recommendations from store employees, music samples, streamed audio spun by store disc jockeys, streamed concert video, pop-culture news and discussion areas.

The initial verdict: It needs work.

The site's size makes navigation important, but what it has is unsatisfactory, with too few ways to burrow through the information. And its reliability is dubious.

For instance, I randomly clicked on one top-seller, the latest by funky Icelandic music collective Gus Gus. What I got were albums by a different band, called Gus.

An honest mistake, and maybe even a useful feature when you don't quite know the name of the band you're seeking. But I want to know more about Gus Gus and can't find it here. Nor can I find anything else the band has done, despite a well-received previous album.

If Branson wants to outcompete Amazon.com, and he does, he'll have to make people want to hang around and buy something. Amazon does that well, loading its site with tons of information about books of all genres, for instance.

Virgin's Gus Gus boo boo (or is that just a Gus boo?) implies a site that makes it harder, not easier to shop, which won't exactly stick customers to your site.

Branson does have some advantages: Unlike Amazon, he won't have to lose hundreds of millions of dollars to establish a brand name.

By plastering the site's URL on Virgin airplanes, cola, record stores, cruise ships, record labels and everything else, he's betting on a cross-pollinating marketing effort that will bring customers in from all directions, and send them back out into all things Virgin.

That model, of course, is closer to what a company such as the Walt Disney Co. is doing with its online site, where entertainment and e-commerce sits on the same home page with the travel services and theme park info.

``I think that seems right,'' Branson said of the Disney comparison. ``There's only a few names like Virgin and Microsoft and Disney out there. I actually believe the megastores and the Internet can work well together.''

With time, Virgin Megastores Online might yet become the Greatest Show on the Internet, rather than just a sideshow act.

Get off on this floor

Like movie premieres but can't stand waiting for hours to see the limos roll up? Columbia TriStar Interactive has a novel alternative, with what it's billing as the first-ever virtual movie premiere.

The company is using the 3-D chat program from Activeworlds.com to host the digital debut for the upcoming ``The Thirteenth Floor,'' a sci-fi thriller about a virtual world set in a building's nonexistent 13th floor.

To take part, you'll need to crawl over to www.thethirteenthfloor.com to get the Active Worlds chat client software and install it before the event starts at 6 p.m. Monday. That evening, click on the Active Worlds browser's option for ``The Thirteenth Floor'' premiere, where you'll be taken to what looks like a theater entrance.

Choose your on-screen ``avatar,'' or digital representation, and watch as avatars of the film's stars (Gretchen Mol, Vincent D'Onofrio, Craig Bierko and Dennis Haysbert) and producers (Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin) field questions from avatars of media people from around the country. In real life, the stars will be stationed at Columbia TriStar offices in Los Angeles and New York, responding to queries by computer.

A moderator also will pass along fan questions. After the celebrities come through the press line, everyone will be asked into the ``theater,'' which will show the movie's trailer and TV commercials.

If this catches on, the catering business in Hollywood will be on the brink of bankruptcy by 2001.

Anime forever

Being an anime fan in America can be trying for those who actually want to see cool Japanese animation regularly. Thank goodness for the Cartoon Network, then, which is feeding your anime jones all week with marathons of ``Sailor Moon'' and ``Dragon Ball Z.''

Between 11:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. Sunday, the channel will show the final 17 episodes of ``Sailor Moon,'' which follows the fanciful exploits of a teen princess who joins other young women to fight the evil Queen Beryl and her Negaverse minions. The episodes have never been shown on U.S. television, network officials said.

The rest of next week, the network will show two hours of episodes daily from ``Dragon Ball Z,'' which follows a small band of crusaders who can summon dragons to help them fight evil adversaries. The shows will run from 4 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.

The channel also will run four hours of ``Dragon Ball Z'' movies - ``The Tree of Might,'' ``The World's Strongest'' and ``Dead Zone Vortex'' - beginning at noon next Saturday.