COLUMN ONE : New Wave Media Blitz Seeks Polly : The hunt for the girl kidnaped in Petaluma has leaped into cyberspace. Searchers are using computer bulletin boards, an MTV rock video and other tools that cast a worldwide net.

PETALUMA, Calif. —  The painful search for missing children has come a long way from photographs on milk cartons. The hunt for Polly Hannah Klaas, under way for two weeks, is a lesson in the new global media.

The 12-year-old Petaluma girl who wanted to be an actress has made MTV News and the E! entertainment channel; her picture is featured in a Soul Asylum rock video shown regularly on MTV.

Likenesses of Polly and her suspected abductor are available to millions of users on Internet, the world’s biggest network of computer systems. An alert to watch for Polly or her kidnaper is the first item seen by thousands of users who sign on to bulletin boards every day.

Electronic versions of flyers about the kidnaping have been sent by computer modem to print shops around the country, which have spit out millions of copies for local distribution.

“This girl’s face has been seen by more people than any child in the history of child abductions,” said Jay Silverberg, former executive editor of the Marin Independent Journal and a volunteer in the search. “We are rewriting the book on how to organize the search for a missing child.”

The massive volunteer campaign to find Polly--abducted at knifepoint from her bedroom the night of Oct. 1--has also blanketed the traditional media, saturating the network news, tabloid TV shows and newspaper front pages across the country with images of Polly and the bearded man police say kidnaped her.

Bay Area news shows have even taken to broadcasting from Petaluma, a Sonoma County suburb 40 miles north of San Francisco, during the search, which is being directed by thousands of volunteers in a donated storefront.

The story jumped from the crime pages into cyberspace when computer-savvy residents of Northern California donated their time to upload information about the case onto the Internet and commercial on-line services such as CompuServe and Prodigy.

The crossover into new wave sources of news, such as MTV and the E! channel, became complete last weekend when actress Winona Ryder, a Petaluma native who went to the same junior high school as Polly, offered a $200,000 reward for the girl’s safe return.

“The awareness of (media) alternatives comes in part from the past presidential campaign, where any candidate who wanted to be taken seriously had an E-mail address,” said Dan Amundson, research director for the Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs. “Now when something happens, whether it’s a missing child, an uprising in China or a flood in the Midwest, you have people looking at these alternative methods of communication.”

For suburban Petaluma, where the 1973 coming-of-age movie “American Graffiti” was shot, this case shows that the town once known for its chicken ranches is not far removed from either the reality of urban crime or the global reach of modern telecommunications.

“This is a case where a real community confined to a small geographic area can project its needs into a virtual community that can span the world,” said Howard Rheingold, author of the book, “The Virtual Community.”

Rheingold said he came across information about the kidnaping in his electronic mail and posted it on a Marin County-based bulletin board known as The Well. He presumes other users quickly sent the material on to other computer screens via E-mail and Internet, which links computer networks in 125 countries.

“One of the qualities of the network is that it’s almost viral in its ability to multiply,” he said.

Polly was playing a board game in her bedroom with two friends when the abductor entered the house, most likely through a window. He asked which of the girls lived in the home, tied and gagged them and carried Polly away. Her mother and a half sister slept in a nearby room.

With the help of polygraph tests, police and the FBI have ruled out family members as suspects and rejected the notion of a hoax. Instead, authorities have concluded that it is an unusual case of a stranger who broke into a home and abducted a child.

More than 2,600 people, few of whom ever met Polly, have volunteered to help at search headquarters in Petaluma. The efforts have generated more than 3,700 tips to the FBI and police, but no solid leads. A third of the Petaluma Police Department and three dozen FBI agents are working the case.

“The volunteer center has kept this story alive,” said Petaluma Police Sgt. Mike Kerns. “It’s phenomenal. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The coincidence of a Hollywood connection has been a key element in the ability to reach people who don’t watch or read traditional news sources and might otherwise never hear of Polly Klaas.

Ryder, who starred in “The Age of Innocence” and “Beetlejuice,” returned home a week ago to visit Polly’s school, talk with her classmates and announce the $200,000 reward. The 21-year-old actress also taped a TV public service announcement seeking information about Polly or her abductor.

Later, members of Polly’s family said the kidnaper himself could claim Ryder’s reward as ransom if he would return Polly.

Ryder’s involvement became grist for such outlets as the E! channel and MTV, where news often has as much to do with the comings and goings of celebrities as it does with world events.

Is it unusual for MTV and the FBI to team up? “Those six initials don’t usually go together,” acknowledged Rick Smith, a spokesman for the FBI.

It also helped the search effort that Ryder’s boyfriend, Dave Pirner, is the lead singer of the rock group Soul Asylum, whose popular video “Runaway Train” already featured pictures of missing children. The MTV video was re-edited to include Polly’s photograph.

Other entertainment figures also have joined in. Marilyn Kentz and Caryl Kristensen, who star as “The Mommies” in a new NBC series, cut a TV public service announcement as did singer Johnny Cash.

Attracting the attention of the nation’s computer users has been the work of a handful of specialists who have placed information about the kidnaping on bulletin boards and with computer networks.

“It’s available to anybody who has a computer with a modem and anybody who has any sort of electronic mail service,” said volunteer Sean Ackley, the system operator of a Bay Area computer bulletin board.

For example, a missing person’s alert on Polly has been posted to six news groups on Usenet, part of Internet, with a potential audience of 15 million users. An electronic call to action was also sent out to about 10,000 bulletin board operators nationwide. Photos of Polly and sketches of the suspect, including a revised drawing released Thursday, also have been posted electronically for viewing on home and office computers.

In the past, searchers have used milk cartons, grocery bags and donated space on advertising flyers to circulate photos of missing children. In addition, some police departments will videotape or fingerprint children to aid in a search should they disappear.

But one advantage of using the computer network over more traditional media is the speed with which data can be distributed to a large audience, said Amundson of the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

“This is not something that students at a few universities and computer hackers use,” he said. “People all over the world are tied in to computer networks.”

The real test in this kind of case is whether the computers produce information that leads to Polly’s return, noted Stewart Brand, founder of The Well bulletin board.

“I think it’s resourceful of them and reflects the level of grass-roots distribution of information that’s happening out there,” he said. “The measure of the medium will be if it actually helps.”

The FBI and police also are using high-tech methods. At the command post in Petaluma, they have set up a sophisticated computer database where all the tips called in can be filed and cross-checked.

At the same time, the effort is not ignoring more traditional methods. By the end of this weekend, organizers expect to distribute 7 million flyers with pictures of Polly and sketches of her kidnaper. Many are being sent by fax and passed out by truckers, bikers and business travelers.

And the search effort is even using the old-fashioned U.S. mail. Children in Petaluma are conducting a letter-writing campaign for Polly, sending information about the case to friends and family in other cities.

“As you may know, it has been a very hard time for all the people in Petaluma,” a girl named Danielle wrote to her aunt in Laguna Niguel. “We have had someone very special taken from us, so please help us find her.”

Contributing to this story were Times researchers Adam Bauman in Los Angeles and Norma Kaufman in San Francisco.