WWW.WHERE IT'S AT; LOOKING FOR SOMETHING NEW? POINT YOUR BROWSER HERE.

NO GHOULS ALLOWED: The folks at Universal Studios have been working overtime down in the lab to come up with their 1997 Halloween Web site. In fact, the highlight of the interactive site is Universal's ``Monster Lab,'' where visitors can dig up buried body parts and assemble creatures from the dead, using pictures, animation and text. Users can also send multimedia Ghoul-gram electronic postcards to friends and listen to readings from classic horror stories including ``Dracula,'' ``Frankenstein'' and ``The Raven.'' The Universal web site can be found at www.universalstudios.com.

3D ARTIFACTS: Westlake Village-based Synthonics Technologies Inc. will develop a multimedia CD-ROM for the Smithsonian Institution to let people interact at home on a personal computer with hundreds of artifacts housed in the institution's 16 museums. The centerpiece of the CD-ROM will be three-dimensional renderings of Smithsonian artifacts created with Synthonics' ``photogrammetric'' software. For the project, Smithsonian staff will chooses the artifacts and art pieces that Synthonics will convert into animated 3-D models. Users can then manipulate the on-screen images to view the artifacts from different angles.

HTML FOR DPOs: Los Angeles-based Virtual Wall Street Inc. said last week it will begin developing Web sites for companies that want to raise capital through direct public offerings. Virtual Wall Street already uses the World Wide Web to promote firms that want to raise capital, either through public offerings or venture capital. The new service will help companies put together investment information on themselves in electronic format as part of a direct public offerings, which bypasses the traditional investment bank fund-raising model.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC OF CD: Until now, back issues of National Geographic inevitably called to mind doctors' waiting rooms and musty storage boxes. But soon those stacks moldering beneath the cobwebs in America's garages and basements may be destined for recycling bins. The Complete National Geographic (for Windows or Macintosh, from Mindscape Inc., at about $200), a collection of 30 CD-ROMs, contains a digitized version of every page of the magazine from the first issue in 1888 through the December 1996 edition.

Collectors may not want to chuck their yellow-spined treasures just yet. The CD-ROM collection omits all the large map supplements (though it includes a large world map on paper), and its second-rate reproduction quality and software cry out for improvement. Still, this package's fascinating contents ultimately overcome its technical flaws.

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Photo: No caption (INTEL presents Universal's Online HORROR Channel)