John Markoff, a reporter for The New York Times, said that this site offers a choice of several themes, and then offers a series of pointers to other pages related to those themes.

But Brock Meeks, chief Washington correspondent for Wired magazine, said the site is far from perfect. He pointed out that during the Nynex/Bell Atlantic merger, the AT&T site provided links to negative articles on the deal.

As another alternative, Microsoft is trying to develop a "cable model," which would allow Web surfers to choose different packages varying on how many and which sites they want to access, panelists said.

"The Microsoft Network is trying to go out and create [popular] Web sites. They're financing a number of content companies," Caruso said. "They're going to sell this aggregation of content to advertisers."

Caruso said the network will then offer users basic, premium and pay-per-view packages to access the sites.

But Caruso said that this model will limit the independent and individual content which makes up much of the Web today.

"Alternative voices drop off the end of that," she said.

These alternative voices drew criticism as well. Panelists pointed out that amateur journalists who report events on their Web pages are highly unreliable.

"The good news about the Web is that everybody has a voice. The bad news about the Web is that everybody has a voice," Kaplan said. "There's role for a good journalist to make sense of those voices."  --By Elizabeth T. Bangs

Internet Can Help Those With AIDS

The Internet is a valuable tool for the thousands of Americans living with AIDS, speakers said at a panel on "AIDS and the Internet: Networks of Knowledge and Infection" last week in Science Center C.

"I use the Internet daily to get vital information on treatment," said Kiyoshi Kuromiya, founder and director of the Philadelphia-based organization Critical Path, who is HIV-positive. "This information may make the difference between life and death for me."

Representatives of the Harvard AIDS Institute, the AIDS Action Committee and Critical Path described the information they have made available on the Web.

The AIDS Action Committee has put its resource index, including evaluations of recent clinical trials, on the Web, said Mike Immel, AIDS Action Committee information manager.

"By the time...information is published in a book, it is historic, some would say ancient," Kuromiya said. "A newsletter can publish information in two to eight weeks. This year we have seen the future of AIDS information on the Internet."