For me it started here : http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html.

How many years ago now? Seven? Ten? I can't remember how long ago it was... but I can remember being utterly gobsmacked... The Diamond Bullet Moment... when I first came across the website where someone had created a version of the programming language PERL in Latin.

The immediate question is Why (FFS)? But being a geek, I know the answer before I've even asked the question. If you're a geek, when a puzzle is let loose in your brain, you have to solve it. You have to. You can't help it. The reason Damian Conway did this probably wasn't a million miles away from the reason I created a 70km wide web page here, although his was a far far bigger job... and it's is brilliant for what it represents... someone doing something massive and massively random, just for the sake of it.

So anyway, somwhere between this, and Clay Shirky's thing about cognitive surplus here...

...yet another revolution is underway. People are doing stuff. Lots of it.

People want to participate in their culture more than they want to sit back and be entertained (and advertised to). They're making stuff and putting it up on the internet and they're not doing it for money, which makes for far more diverse and interesting output. And because it's all going up on the internet, these things aren't getting lost. They're getting to cross-pollinate with other ideas. This is already happening with video in a fairly big way... re-editing (copyrighted) videos is a major driver (if not the major driver) of meme propagation at the moment.

It's not just that the copyright cartels are being sidelined and that their business models are now anachronistic, the entire culture has changed. Copying and mutating IS the culture. Probably always was - what with it being a consciously driven replication of the evolutionary process etc:

(you need to watch these two videos at the same time)

But this isn't about that. This is a collection of projects from the fringe.