The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Santa, Plz Snd Legos & Barney, Thx : Internet: More than a million kids this year have e-mailed their wish lists to a virtual North Pole.

By AMY HARMON

Dec. 21, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In the olden days, the Alder kids used to send letters to Santa up the chimney. This year, like more than a million other true children of the electronic age, they filed their requests over the Internet.

“E-mail is faster and easier, and you get a response,” says the pragmatic Corey, your typical 11-year-old computer jock. The elder Alder typed in his little brother Sam’s list (Legos, cap gun, Power Rangers costume) and sent it to Santa at the digital North Pole last week. One of them, that is.

At last count, Santa had accumulated some 13 e-mail addresses this year, plus at least five sites on the World Wide Web. Once a cute novelty for the fiber-optically inclined, cyber-Santas are now populating every virtual street corner on the global network.

And while the computer-generated Clauses have done their share to spread on-line cheer, a number of them are out to turn a profit too. One site encourages users to purchase a commemorative “I E-Mailed Santa” button for $5.00. Another displays an on-line catalogue of “Santa’s Christmas Favorites.” “Sure, Santa and commerce are inextricably linked,” grumbled one parent on-line, “but is the big guy so strapped for cash that he has to turn the workshop into a showroom?”

As cyber-Santas emerge as a favorite publicity-generator for several of the Net’s emerging enterprises, they are also encountering--and coping accordingly-- with some challenges not necessarily common in the analog world.

Spamming, for instance.

A nonprofit Santa site on the World Wide Web, hosted by the Internet Multicasting Service, recruited several firms to donate a dime to a local charity for every time a user logs onto its site--up to a predetermined limit.

Last week, a (perhaps well-meaning) message was sent out over the network, encouraging people to “spam Santa”--Net-talk for flooding the site with mail. Within a few days, the site had received 200,000 letters, many written by computer programs designed to send up to 6,500 messages at once.

Carl Malamud, Elfmaster and president of the service, countered with an electronic posting to several Internet newsgroups: “On behalf of Mr. Claus and the Elves, I’d like to say that mailbombs to Santa and the Elves will result in immediate removal of your name from the ‘good’ list and a transfer to the ‘bad’ list.”

Internet Access Inc., an Ottawa-based firm, escaped a spam attack but has nevertheless been deluged with nearly 5,000 letters a day to Santa since publicizing its North Pole address earlier this month.

So the company recently sent an urgent plea for aid out on the Net, with the subject line S.O.S. (Save Our Santa): “Santa needs corporate help to finance his sleigh . . .If your company would like to sponsor northpole.net, please email. . . .”

Usually, reaching Santa by e-mail offers a critical benefit that the more traditional forms of correspondence do not: a reply.

Several of the services use automatic, computer-generated replies. Malamud’s Christmas computer scans for popular requests and inserts a predetermined response. (Boys who request Cindy Crawford, for example, are told that “Rudolph says don’t hold your breath.”)

Internet Access has “instructed the elves to remember, Santa does not promise anything, nor does he say he can’t get anything,” administrator Mary-Ellen Heney says.

Says Loren Hudson, a Santa Rosa parent who helped his 5-year-old sons Peter and Christopher send e-mail to the Santa sponsored by Internet Media Services: “When you send an anonymous post to the North Pole, you don’t often get something back. I think they’ll remember it and ask to do the same next year. And we probably will.”

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North Poles

Here are some Internet addresses for Santa letters and “visiting” the North Pole.

https://northpole.net/

santa.html

https://www.neosoft.com/

citylink/xmas/default.html

https://north.pole.org

https://north-pole

.w3.com/santa

https://www.dash.com/

netro/fun.fun.html