POP GOES THE WEBSITE

How do you define entertainment on the World Wide Web? A large part of the medium's appeal is that it can be as social (chatting away about the Academy Awards), mindless (checking out what someone in Finland thought of last week's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), or prurient (downloading supposed nude photos of Alyssa Milano or Brad Pitt) as the user wishes. Diverting as these pursuits may be, none of them offer much brand-name appeal for viewers -- or profit potential for advertisers. That, in a virtual nutshell, is why only a handful of websites and high-profile companies -- chief among them CNET, the San Francisco-based media powerhouse that produces cyber-slanted cable shows (CNET Central, The New Edge) -- have been able to create a lucrative niche on the Net.

Vastly entertaining, but not really offering entertainment in the usual sense of the word, CNET's dynamic home page, CNET.COM (www.cnet.com), is probably bookmarked on more folks' Web browsers than the popular search engines Yahoo! and Excite combined. Focusing on all topics cyber, CNET.com features a live audio and visual technology-news feed; zippy columns about Internet culture; up-to-date hardware and software reviews; and links to indispensable CNET pages such as search.com (another search engine, natch) and shareware.com (which offers tons of free software). Most important, CNET. com allows newcomers a painless entry onto the Web.

Which brings us to CNET's latest foray into entertainment, a collaboration with computer-chip giant Intel called MEDIADOME (www.mediadome.com). Devoted exclusively to pop culture, Mediadome entices visitors with biweekly audio and video ''webisodes.'' Since the site's launch a couple of months ago, CNET and Intel have focused their considerable multimedia arsenal on hip-hoppers Fugees, jazz stalwart Herbie Hancock, the crashed-on-takeoff Ray Liotta flick Turbulence, and Driftwood, a new three-dimensional talking comic strip starring a lobster with a brogue and a Bronx-born seagull.

This is unremarkable by itself: There are fan sites devoted to Fugees that are just as involving, if much lower-tech, than Mediadome's Fugees webisode, which includes interviews with band members Lauryn Hill and Pras Michel, a combat game keyed to the song ''Ready or Not,'' and a virtual mixing board complete with scratching turntables. No, what makes this site notable is that in the name of entertaining cybersurfers, it's loading them down with the latest interactive gizmos -- Shockwave, VivoActive, Viscape, RealAudio, and other plug-ins that add sound and motion to the Web -- as well as priming users for whatever showbiz goodies Intel and CNET might shoot down the bandwidth pike.

This isn't as heinous as it sounds; in fact, it's a pretty good deal, considering that all this neat stuff can be downloaded free -- and then reside forevermore on your hard drive. But it's an even sweeter deal for CNET, which again gets to position itself at the cutting edge of the Web. And it's a potential gusher for Intel, the company that churns out the guts of 90 percent of the world's personal computers. RealAudio and VivoActive are ''streaming'' technologies, meaning they enable users to access audio and video in real time, rather than waiting endless minutes to finish downloading, for example, three megabytes' worth of the Devil's Own trailer. Like most software, though, these programs work best on ever-faster computers harboring ever-more-sophisticated Pentium chips, manufactured by -- you guessed it -- Intel.

Corporate conspiracies aside, just how entertaining is Mediadome? Well, like your average episode of, let's say, Entertainment Tonight, it's a mixed bag. Since all the webisodes to date have been structured similarly -- a game or two, behind-the-scenes video clips, RealAudio interviews -- the site stands or falls on its star power, and thus, like any magazine show, on the booking savvy of its producers. Scoring Fugees was a coup, but in the time you spend downloading the Turbulence flight simulator you could already have walked out of the theater. Unfortunately, Mediadome already seems to be developing some virtual cracks: Its latest guest is the relentlessly self-promoting trend spotter Faith Popcorn, who would show up at the opening of a phone booth. If that's the future of the Web, I'll take ET any day. CNET.com: A Mediadome: B-