PLUGGED IN : NEWS BYTES.

MOVIES ON YOUR PC: Sirius Publishing recently shipped its initial release of 50 MovieCD titles to software and entertainment retail outlets. The discs deliver VHS quality, full-screen, full-motion video to your computer screen. Retailing for between $9.95 and $19.95 - depending on the title - MovieCDs are compatible on any PC 486/66 or better, with Windows 3.1 or better, with a two-speed CD ROM drive. Some of the more famous feature film titles are ``Dumb & Dumber,'' ``Seven,'' ``Mortal Kombat'' and ``The Mask.''

SPEAK UP: Four prominent Web sites have joined forces in order to explore some of the major issues confronting the World Wide Web and on-line communities. Electric Minds at http://www.minds.com, Feed at http://www.feedmag.com, Salon at http://www.salonmagazine.com and The Site at http://www.thesite.com are jointly tackling such subjects as the growing popularity of libertarianism. Net users curious about the subject can read essays on the subject at Salon, browse through a panel of expert opinions in Feed, and discuss the subject at Electric Minds and The Site.

WEB LINKS

ON-LINE HISTORY LESSON: In honor of Black History Month, don't miss a wonderful new site from Encyclopaedia Britannica at http://blackhistory.eb.com/. Britannica Guide to Black History is visually compelling and provides 565 articles, 300 photos and 15 photos with accompanying audio. It highlights pivotal moments in African-American history from 1619 to the present.

FOR NEWS JUNKIES A free service from Excite promises to be the ultimate news-gathering source for Internet users. NewsTracker at http://nt.excite.com/ is free, but requires users to fill out a registration form. Once people join, they can specify key topics they'd like to track. The service then searches more than 300 newspapers and magazines each day, and culls the stories that fit within these topics. A terrific feature is the service's ability to update users' topics based on past reading habits: Select the best articles, click on ``learn what I like'' and the service will automatically update and fine-tune the user's future searches.

RANDOM ACCESS

DIGITAL DEBUT The world's first MPEG (moving picture experts group)-encoding digital video camera from Hitachi Ltd. will go on sale in Japan on Saturday. The new camera, which sells for $1,100, allows users readily to access and edit digital video data on a personal computer screen. The MP-EG1 can store moving images of up to 20 minutes or about 3,000 still pictures on a 260-megabyte hard disk card, which sells separately for $625.

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