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Far less than 1% of visits to most sites that thrive on user-created materials are attributable as participatory, the remaining 99% are passive visits.

An attempt at blocking an HD-DVD key from being published on Digg caused uproar when cease-and-desist letters demanded that the code be removed from several high-profile Web sites. This led to the key's proliferation across other web sites and chat rooms, in various formats, with one commentator describing it as having become "the most famous number on the Internet". Within a month, the key had been reprinted on over 280,000 pages, and had appeared in a song on YouTube which had been played over 45,000 times.[15][16][17]

Mr. Greenwald’s McCain videos, most of which portray the senator as contradicting himself in different settings, have been viewed more than five million times — more than Mr. McCain’s own campaign videos have been downloaded on YouTube.

Mr. Greenwald shows how technology has dispersed the power to shape campaign narratives, potentially upending the way American presidential campaigns are fought.

But in the 2008 race, the first in which campaigns are feeling the full force of the changes wrought by the Web, the most attention-grabbing attacks are increasingly coming from people outside the political world. In some cases they are amateurs operating with nothing but passion, a computer and a YouTube account, in other cases sophisticated media types with more elaborate resources but no campaign experience.

The New York Times wanted to convert 11 million articles dating from the newspaper's founding in 1851 through 1989 to make themavailable through its website search engine. The Times scanned in thestories, converted them to TIFF files, then uploaded the files toAmazon's S3, taking up four terabytes of space. "The Times didn't coor-dinate the job with Amazon--someone in IT just signed up for the ser-vice on the Web using a credit card," IDG News Service reported. Then,using Amazon's EC2 computing platform, the Times ran a PDF conver-sion application that converted the 4TB of TIFF data into 1.5TB of PDFfiles. Using Amazon's computers, the job took about 24 hours.

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