What happens when plebeians determine the construction and meaning of information?

A list of idiosyncratic and partial answers:

Answer: Anybody can be a diarist, belle-lettrist, novelist, wikist, 3° winker, whatever

A blog is a web page that contains brief, discrete hunks of information called posts. These posts are arranged in reverse-chronological order (the most recent posts come first). Each post is uniquely identified by an anchor tag, and it is marked with a permanent link that can be referred to by others who wish to link to it. Essential Blogging. Cory Doctorow, et al. O'Reilly, 2002

Originally called weblogs, now they're called blogs, a term coined by Peter Merholz. Directories of blogs: Weblogs.com, Eatonweb Portal, Globe of Blogs

Blogging for two or more: wiki

What's a wiki? A wiki is a collaboration tool invented by Ward Cunningham that permits pages to be changed and published using only a web browser (no programming required). Pages are automatically created and linked to each other.

Wiki Wiki Web

With 3° you can: Throw a personalized animation on your friends' desktops with winks; Listen to a shared play list simultaneously, created from music you own; Easily send digital photos from last night's party to your friends; Initiate group chat with MSN Messenger.

threedegrees

Answer: Anybody can be a movie star, porn star, exhibitionist, photoblogger, media exchanger, whatever

"The confession makes great television because it de fines the moment where the guard is lowered, where the anonymity of the private self is suddenly revealed. It also becomes the stock material for the Internet. Personal webpages become the location for revealing a new version of the private/public self. What links these public representations of identity through revelation is that they presume an audience. The presumption of an audience is the way that contemporary identity is now more connected to a clearly identified desire to be notorious. The contemporary self demands outside and anonymous recognition for internal validation -- in other words a television audience or reasonable facsimile. Fame and identity intertwine and the confession becomes the channel through which the individual can make the private self clearly public."

P.David Marshall "Confession and Identity" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.3 1998

Photoblogs.org A photoblog is a type of blog that is regularly updated with photos. Some photoblogs focus only on photography, while others have photos in addition to other content. All photoblogs, however, consider photos to be an important part of their chronological blogging structure.

World Wide Media Exchange is a centralized index of digital photos, where photos are tagged by the geographic location where they were shot. The location where a photo was taken provides strong clues about its semantic content and also offers an intuitive way to index it, even among a very large collection.

Answer: Anybody can be Marco Polo, an arm-chair traveler, virtual tourist, whatever

Web cams from the University of Washington

A virtual walk around Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Nice, Paris, Rennes, Strasbourg, Toulouse, etc.

Answer: Anybody can be a musician, composer, ripper, decoder, rock star, whatever

MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3) is a standard technology and format for compression a sound sequence into a very small file (about one-twelfth the size of the original file) while preserving the original level of sound quality when it is played. In digital audio technology, a ripper is a program that moves a sound sequence from a compact disk onto a computer hard drive as a Wave file, often as a step toward converting it to an MP3-encoded file.digital audio technology, an encoder is a program that converts an audio WAV file into an MP3 file, a highly-compressed sound file that preserves the quality of a CD recording.

In 1957, Max Mathews, at Bell Telephone Labs at Murray Hill, New Jersey, wrote Music I, the first computer program to generate sound. Excitement at the possibilities of digital audio led Mathews and associates to invite composers James Tenney and Jean-Claude Risset to work at Bell Labs. By 1968, several generations of software had been finished, and Music V, written in Fortran, became the seminal model for most future versions of music software. One distinctive moment in those early days was the use of a computer to sing 'Bicycle Built for Two', documented at the end of Stanley Kubrick's film '2001' when the computer Hal sings the song as he expires and his life, including his childhood at Bell Labs, flashes past. Joel Chadabe A Brief History of Electronic Music

Answer: Anybody can start their own academic journal, literary journal, poetry review, whatever

Paul Ginsparg    arXiv.org e-Print archive

"The first database, hep-th (for High Energy Physics -- Theory), was started in August of '91 and was intended for usage by a small subcommunity of less than 200 physicists, then working on a so-called "matrix model" approach to studying string theory and two dimensional gravity. Within a few months, the original hep-th had quickly expanded in its scope to over 1000 users, and after little more than three years now has over 3600 users. More significantly, there are numerous other physics databases now in operation that currently serve over 25,000 physicists and typically process more than 40,000 electronic transactions per day (i.e. as of 10/94)."

To summarize, to date we've learned:

- The exponential increase in electronic networking usage has 
	opened new possibilities for formal and informal communication 
	of research information. 
- For some fields of physics, the on-line electronic archives 
	immediately became the primary means of communicating ongoing 
	research information, with conventional journals entirely 
	supplanted in this role. Researchers will voluntarily subscribe 
	and make aggressive use of these systems which will continue to 
	grow rapidly. The current levels of technology and network 
	connectivity are adequate to support these systems, and continue 
	to improve. 
- For some fields of physics, open (i.e. unrefereed) distribution 
	of research can work well and has advantages for researchers 
	both in developed and undeveloped-countries

     Although we use the term "new media poetry" as a genre of "electronic literature" to describe the work included in Poems that Go, "literature" itself proves to be a pesky term. Indeed, we have been accused of devaluing the word at the expense of the image. Our goal here is not to elevate one art above the rest, but to seek an inclusive understanding of literature, one that goes beyond written text-based works, to include visual, aural and media literacy.
     In this spirit, Poems that Go explores the intersections between motion, sound, image, text, and code. The work we feature explores how language is shaped in new media spaces, how interactivity can change the meaning of a sign, how an image can conflict with a sound, and how code exerts machine-order on a text.
     We'd like to think of this space on the Web as a creative field for this generation's artists and writers to probe the medium's potential and integrate these art forms to challenge the definition of poetry. One which challenges you, the new viewers, readers, writers and artists, to discover extraordinary ways to make sense of language, art, and narrative in a way that is both critical and entertaining.

Answer: Anybody can e-publish, build an e-library, whatever

"Riding the Bullet," a 66-page King ghost story, was made available at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday only on the Internet. Web sites including Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com were swamped with requests, making downloading it nearly impossible

"Riding the Bullet," written shortly after King's near-fatal accident in June, is about a hitchhiker finding a ride. It sells for $2.50 on many Web sites, though Barnes & Noble made it available for free Tuesday, and Amazon has no plans to charge for the download, according to company spokeswoman Kristin Schaefer.

"Stephen King's decision to publish his new short story in electronic format is a concrete declaration that the eBook format has arrived," said Steve Riggio, vice chairman of Barnes & Noble.com. "We see a time in the not too distant future when virtually every book in print will be available in both physical and electronic formats." "Demand for King eBook makes download downright impossible"

"The famed horror author is back now with his second unpublished, downloadable offering -- again in PDF -- but with a new, simplified distribution scheme. Left out of the process this time, some publishers and security technology companies may feel like they're in the direct path of King's second electronic bullet."

"King is short-circuiting a repeat of history by abandoning the notion of security, instead making "The Plant" available in unlocked format -- but with a twist. He'll upload at least two installments of the novel, asking readers to pay one dollar for each -- based purely on the honor system

If at least 75 percent of those who download installments one (July 24) and two (August 21) pay up, King promises to continue the experiment. Anything less, he writes on his official Web site, he'll pull the plug. Stephen King and PDF II: Honesty v. Security

The premise on which Michael Hart based Project Gutenberg was: anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely. . .what Michael termed "Replicator Technology" The concept of Replicator Technology is simple; once a book or any other item (including pictures, sounds, and even 3-D items can be stored in a computer), then any number of copies can and will be available. Everyone in the world, or even not in this world (given satellite transmission) can have a copy of a book that has been entered into a computer.

Project Gutenberg Etexts are made available in what has become known as "Plain Vanilla ASCII," meaning the low set of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange: ie the same kind of character you read on a normal printed page-- italics, underlines, and bolds have been capitalized. The reason for this is that 99% of the hardware and software a person is likely to run into can read and search these files. History and Philosophy of PROJECT GUTENBERG

Answer: Anyone can invent their own language, orthography, argot, slang, 133t5p33k, whatever

In the first major competition of its kind, the Guardian awarded cash prizes to people who wrote the best poetry on their mobile phones, using the popular short text message service (SMS). People on their way to work, people on their way home, and people just out and about, banged out poems and shot them to the newspaper at an incredible rate.

Because the size of a phone's screen is limited and an SMS message can hold only 160 characters, contestants had rather interesting ways of expressing their thoughts. Check out Hetty Hughes' championship entry:

txtin iz messin,
mi headn'me englis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsed w
letters shes getn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
&she's african 
	

The newspaper winnowed the entries down to 100 and then handed them to professional poets who selected seven of the poems for cash prizes. The judges chose a poem written by Julia Bird as the "most creative use of SMS 'shorthand' in a poem:

14:
a txt msg pom.

his is r bunsn brnr bl%,
his hair lyk fe filings
W/ac/dc going thru.
I sit by him in kemistry,
it splits my @oms
wen he :-)s @ me. 

During the early 1980s, hackers that didn't want their websites, newsgroups, etc, to be picked up in a simple keyword search began using numbers to replace certain letters (mostly vowels) such as A = 4 or E = 3.

At this point, l33t speak was only known to a select few and only used when necessary. However, in 1994, id Software began to add Internet connectivity to Doom and Doom II, leading to a revolution in PC gaming and also to the rise of l33t speak.

megatokyo brought l33t speak into mainstream with its infamous speak l33t? comic. These days l33t speak is very well known to the hardcore Internet community (especially gamers). An Explanation of l33t Speak