Just 20 miles north of Manhattan, in suburban Tarrytown, N.Y., there's a par-three hole on the back nine at Sleepy Hollow Country Club. Standing on the 16th tee, taking in the sweeping view of the rocky bluffs of the Hudson River, it's easy to imagine you're the master of all you survey.

It's the kind of place where, after 15 holes of schmoozing, you can shake hands on a business deal. It's here that Gerry Roche, chairman of the giant international recruitment ^rm Heidrick & Struggles, entertains top executives. The clientele is exclusive, macho, very white, predominantly middle-age and dripping with money and power.

These are the stomping grounds of New York's old boys network, an empire of feudal hierarchies, pregnant gestures, rigid caste lines and unspoken rules where who you went to school with and where you spend your weekends still counts for a lot.

The scene is a little different at Coffee Shop, the trendy downtown eatery. Forget sweeping panoramas; the view from the glori^ed diner banquettes is of dog walkers scooping poop in Union Square Park. And while the scene inside can be glamorous - a row of fashion models at the bar - you are likely to ^nd new-media types like Lara Stein, the former Microsoft (MSFT) staffer who now runs IXL New York, and Steve Baum, of Micro Interactive, enjoying afternoon risotto.

Just as the rise of the Internet has forced people like Advance Publications (dossier) founder S.I. Newhouse and Time Warner (TWTC) chairman Gerald Levin to learn how to pronounce "URL," the rise of the Silicon Alley new-media community has resulted in the creation of an entirely new New York business structure - a new boys network through which companies form, contacts meet, investments ~ow and deals happen.

Like everything else in the Internet age, this network came together through a mixture of happy accidents and canny planning by organizations like the New York New Media Association.

"A couple of years ago it was much more of a challenge to get to people," says Seth Goldstein, who last year sold his ^rst interactive marketing start-up, SiteSpeci^c, to CKS for $6 million. This year, at the tender age of 27, Goldstein left CKS to found a new start-up. "I'm now in a position where I can get phone calls returned and e-mails returned," he says.

Underpinning it all was a belief that this new boys network would be different from the old one - race- and gender-neutral, open, agile. And that has happened - to a degree.

But in many ways this new network remains as cliquish, as male, as white and as Ivy League as the old boys network its members seek to replace.

There are young guns like Goldstein, the money circle dominated by venture ^rm Flatiron Partners (dossier), and the old cable honchos like Scott Kurnit, seeking the next big thing.

"It's like hitting your head against the wall trying to break into this clique," says Don Rojas, a veteran journalist who publishes the Black World Today, an ambitious Internet Web venture devoted to reporting news from the African diaspora. "We were part of the NYNMA Angels screening process [to get funding from angel investors ], and we did our little dog-and-pony show," says Rojas. "The ^rst question to us was, 'Why don't you go to black celebrities who have money?' We didn't get into a polemic with them, but we were a little put off."

At the heart of the network is the entrepreneur. Because new-media companies in New York live and die so quickly, you're judged not