I was really intrigued by Manovich's discussion of the qualities of new media. I thought number 3 (Authorship as seleciton from a menu) was particularly interesting.

A dorky anecdote: In middle school I used to sneak on the internet after school to learn HTML and work on designing my tripod.com Nirvana fan site. This was back in the day when turning a hyperlink red instead of nursery school-blue was a big deal, frames were hard to make, and text was presented in long, linear, unadorned chunks. Little did I know my parents were still paying by the minute for our internet connection and when they caught on after a couple of months when our internet bill skyrocketed, I was internet-grounded.