Sleepless in Silicon Alley

For new-media firms, the all-nighter is part of the professional code. But at ''24 Hours in CyberHell,'' a contest sponsored last week by the New York New Media Association, it became an art form.

The mission: To design a Web site from the ground up--in 24 hours.

The competitors: Four diverse Silicon Alley start-ups: Small World Software, Hyperspace Cowgirls, go-Digital, and US Web Cornerstone.

The booty: The chance to show off before the city's only liquid patron: Microsoft, in the form of M3P, the content-development wing managed by Lara Stein, and a panel of MSN Channel producers.

On the evening of June 2, after a hard day at the office, they were off. 8:00 p.m., 55 Broad Street: Microsoft execs outline the project: to create a site fostering ''democracy on-line'' that could run on one of Microsoft Network's six subscriber channels. Stein fires off buzzwords: ''real-time chat and polling,'' ''streaming media,'' and, of course, the holy grail--''community.'' The teams' eyes don't glaze over.

11:15 p.m.: Union Square: Huddled around a table, four Hyperspace Cowgirls (and three 'boys) pull out their own big white sheets of paper and draw green bubbles. Not surprisingly for a children's CD-ROM company started by a mother-daughter team, they've also dreamed up a site about kids' rights.

1:35 a.m.: The Cowgirls have all abandoned the ranch, leaving one designer to deal with graphics.

5:45 a.m.: The Hyperspace Cowgirls return to the office and start selecting images for Splitsville, their site for children of divorce . . . The brainstorming has been taxing, says Susan Shaw, the sedate CEO. ''With a client, if you go and pitch and it fails, it's private failure,'' she confesses. ''It's just much harder to work with your peers because that's public failure.''

7:15 p.m.: The Cowgirls' bright green Splitsville includes gems like a question-and-answer area called Peer Abby. Shaw presents an interactive ''Children's Bill of Rights.''