HOLLYWEBB

MTV

Address: https://www.mtv.com

What it is: More than just your run-of-the-mill TV show pages with downloadable video/images/sounds and chats (which of course they have). There’s also tons of music news (a list of artists and bands you can click on for specific past news is handy) and gossip from Motel California, as well as local guides to “all things music”--clubs, record stores, concerts and radio stations. The clubs, record stores and radio stations have information on hours, genres, addresses to write or visit and phone numbers. Also, make sure to find the Now What? pages (buried in Tubescan)--they’re a Gen-X manual for the real world. Getting a job, an apartment and some money. In other words, a life.

Comments: The local guides are excellent. Few of the commercial entertainment sites go out of their way to offer information on anything but what they’re doing. They’re more like, um ... commercials. MTV rocks.

Now, if only they could wrench “Loveline” from AOL’s clutches ...

Sony Pictures Entertainment

Address: https://www.spe.sony.com

What it is: Movie theme pages, television info pages, home video summaries and a studio tour (really just a handful of pictures of people working on the lot).

Comments: Blah, blah, blah. Most of these studio sites are the same--only the movies are different. But this site distinguishes itself in two ways. First, its TV game show pages (“Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!”) link to online versions of the games --which are very neat but very slow--at Sony’s The Station. But it’s the online game BigShot (it can be hard to find: https://www.spe

.sony.com/bigshot/) that’s the real winner. The idea is to move up the ranks from mail-room hack to executive producer. It’s very cool. Each level is a different Shockwave game--or you can download the game if your computer doesn’t support their fancy version of Shockwave Director. Fun, fun, fun.