David Bowie has his own online portal

”It’s a tech version of me,” David Bowie says of the new Internet venture that bears his name, and he isn’t kidding. The striking visuals, an ambitious creative agenda, the quixotic, serendipitous amalgam of the serious and the playfully vapid that are BowieNet (www.davidbowie.com) all evoke Ziggy Stardust. ”It’s such a body of madness, with the chaos of decentralized structure,” Bowie, 51, continues, speaking via phone from his Caribbean retreat. ”Personally, I find it a perfect representation of how I think.”

Yawn — another official website devoted to an aging ’70s rock dinosaur, right? Not quite. BowieNet is actually an Internet service provider that offers subscribers the full range of goods including e-mail service, Net connections, and a Web browser, plus such Bowie-specific content as song and album catalogs, lyrics, photos, and snippets of streaming audio. Of course, if you opt not to pay, BowieNet doubles as an official site, since the free area includes bulletin boards and links to his paintings. And even those who don’t sign up for the $19.95-a-month service (the going rate for other ISPs) will get the chance to help compose lyrics for a new Bowie song. But subscribers will get more than just a davidbowie.com e-mail address: They will be able to design cover art and write liner notes for a ”virtual CD,” and sit in on recording sessions as the artist tapes tracks for a new album. This is a place where raging David Bowie fanatics will find themselves surrounded by like-minded company: BowieNet has signed up ”multiple thousands” of users since launching Sept. 1, according to one of Bowie’s partners, and is well ahead of expectations.

The musician’s transformation into a would-be Web visionary began with an interest in computer-generated art; he’s been creating digital paintings since 1993. (Asked about his system of choice, Bowie fairly shouts, ”Macintosh! I mean, come on!”) He was urged on by his son, Duncan, 27, whom Bowie describes as ”quite a heavyweight tech-head,” recalling that ”he got me hooked on the ideas of community and chat.”

Enter Ron Roy, a partner in New York City-based UltraStar. ”Every band and personality in the business has a website,” says Roy, who got his rockers-on-the-Web cred building a site for the Cure. ”So what’s the next step? ISP services.” Bowie saw in UltraStar’s business logic ”the chance to create a portal with one predominant thought: Let’s increase the sense of community.”

It’s a strategy that may turn out to be a new battleground in the portal wars: cyberspace filtered through the sensibilities of your favorite celebrity. ”We’ll never compete with AOL,” says Roy realistically, ”but we’re a boutique.” For Bowie, the lure is in the creative possibilities rather than the profit potential. ”I could have gone more corporate and retail if I wanted to make a lot of money,” he says. ”The smaller, leaner portals will always be more creative than the giants.”

The man who fell to Earth estimates that he puts about two hours a day into tending his ISP garden — writing an online journal, answering messages, posting digital photographs, and hosting the occasional chat session. Much more frequently, he says, he drops in anonymously. ”I have a hatful of names,” he laughs, ”and no one knows when I’m there. I’m the polite one.”

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