All of these forays are well and good, but the Internet is facing the imminent loss of federal funding. If development is to continue at today's pace, or even more quickly, then room must be made on the Net for commercial concerns. To sell effectively on the Net, most analysts believe the least that's needed is a rich graphical interface--if not dynamic media--and that takes bandwidth.

"Businesses are the ones with the bandwidth," says Jeanine parker, national president of the International Interactive Communications Society. "It makes sense that they would be the ones to cut their teeth on this, to be the initial large-scale multimedia producers."

So far, none of the marketing adventures on the Internet has been on a mega-corporate scale. For instance, Los Angeles-based Kaleidospace offers independent artists, musicians, authors, filmmakers and animators an online Mosaic showcase for their wares. Launched last spring by Jeannie Novak and Peter Markiewicz, the digital catalog for the aesthetic set enjoys more than 150,00 visits a month. Fans are scattered across the globe and, like most Internet sites, access occurs 24 hours a day. "Brad Anderson's surf videos are a bit reminiscent of the Endless Summer movie but with a bunk rock soundtrack," says Kaleidospace's Mark Mauer. "He's incredibly popular in Japan, and people over there are always logging on and looking at his stuff."

Unlike some WWW sites that feature files in the multi-megabyte range, Kaleidospace recommends that clients keep their files under 1MB. Some, like the band Emote, offer both 1.3MB and shorter 700KB versions of the same song, letting the "audience" decide how much time they want to spend downloading.

Because the contributing artist isn't generally familiar with the authoring tools necessary for creating a Mosaic home page, Kaleidospace builds the page to the client's specs for a modest $50; monthly fees total another $50.