THE HYPE THE UPSHOT OF DOWNLOADS IS IT CINDY OR DANNI? DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK.

So who's really the darling of the Internet?

Is it Cindy Margolis, the Valley girl who parlayed a class project into a career online and in Hollywood, most recently with ``The Cindy Margolis Show'' (12:30 a.m. Saturdays on CBS)?

Or is it Danni Ashe, the soft-core cheesecake queen whose Net noodling became Danni's Hard Drive, a Culver City company that grossed $5.2 million last year.

Margolis has long been tabbed the Net's most downloaded woman, first by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, then the Guinness Book of World Records.

The magazine based its title on women who retain some tiny shred of clothing in their pictures, i.e., not porn queens. They named Margolis Queen of the Net because of the thousands of pictures pulled yearly from www.cindymargolis.com and AOL. But when the Guinness people did the same, Ashe got annoyed.

``I said, 'Wait a minute, I'm not very happy about it,' '' Ashe said.

So Ashe set three employees to count a whopping 841 million downloads of her shots since February, 1996. Facts in hand, Ashe just nabbed the Guinness record, then set up www.mostdownloadedwoman.com to detail it all.

For her part, Margolis said it's like comparing grapefruit and watermelon in deciding who's the Net's most downloaded damsel.

``I don't see Danni Ashe as any kind of competitor because that is the porn industry, and I keep my clothes on,'' Margolis said. ``I'm PG and she's X.''

Of course, it's not like Margolis will go broke, even without the record. She has her new TV show and another she hosts for E!, her Web site and appearances in films such as ``Austin Powers.'' Don't cry for her, Argentina.

- David Bloom

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(color) CINDY MARGOLIS