There are many ways for students (and others) to contribute to the WWW. I have four suggestions for anyone who would like to get started with active participation.
This is easier that you might think, and even if you do not have access to a web server (such as our departmental server) you can find many sites that will host your site for free. Here I have only one hint: Do consider using an editing tool such as Frontpage or Dreamweaver. I am personally a huge fan of Dreamweaver, though I obviously use only the most basic features.
Still, if making a personal web page seems like too much of an adventure, you might consider the somewhat easier project of creating a blog.
Blogs (or Web Logs) are extremely easy to create. For example, I used Blogger to create a blog to help organize my thoughts on Epistemology of Trends, and the start-up literally took me less than twenty minutes. To be honest, I haven't done much with this blog since creating it, but still it demonstrated to me the potential of the technology. In my case, a blog is not quite sufficient. I like the freedom that one gets from the architecture of a full web site.
Nevertheless, I did start a second blog, BirdFluEconomics. It was a pleasing source of entertainment over the summer of 2006. It was also somthing more of a success than the trends blog. For a while at least it was getting a serious number of hits.
I encourage anyone with the faintest interest in blogging to start their own. It takes very little time, and the public nature of the discussion seems to help to focus ones thinking. Students in particular might benefit from creating a blog as a way to document their progress as they go through a course, or collection of courses.
Some blogs are extremely professional affairs that have tens of thousands of readers, and some blogs are only public versions of "Dear Diary." The blogs that interest me are in between; they are public conversations about specialized activities. They are likely to have just a handful of readers, many of whom may already be acquainted.
If you regularly use Google to find answers to questions, you have no doubt run into many articles from Wikipedia, the most frequently accessed free web-based encyclopedia. What you may not have realized is that the articles in this encyclopedia are simply contributed by whoever feels the urge to write the article. The contributions are monitored, but the monitors are generous; if you feel that you have the expertise, the monitors will almost certainly agree.
The voluntary nature of this enterprise does have some cost. In particular, there are peculiar imbalances of the coverage. For example, certain video games or television programs may have more coverage than the Second World War. Nevertheless, Wikipedia does have content of great value, and there is excellent coverage of topics from the ephemeral to the timeless.
If you have expertise in a topic from basket weaving to James-Stein shrinkage, you might consider putting that expertise to work by contributing an article. Immediately, your work will have world-class visibility.
It is stunningly easy to contribute a new article, or to make editorial changes to an existing article. If you want to learn more about Wikipedia, here are some resources:
Wikipedia's Homepage has everything you need to know to get started, including well written tutorials that take you through the process step-by-step.
For a sense of perspective, you might want to learn how the Wikipedia experiment has prospered over time. Andrea Ciffolilli's article Phantom Authority provides an unsentimental perspective.
Finally, as an example of a Wikipedia article that I found useful, consider the one on Whig history. I came across this term only a few years ago. I had to look it up, and Google sent me straight to Wikipedia. I found the article to be completely suited to my needs, and the authority of the article speaks for itself (up to the precision of my needs).
This is a clearly a valuable service if done responsibly. So, if you have recently read a book that is not already extensively reviewed on Amazon, why not take a moment to share your experience with others? Reviews are particularly useful when they honestly assist with the purchasing decision. For technical books, this almost always means helping the potential reader to understand if he is really part of the target audience. For non-technical books, the charge is broader --- and more fun.
Incidentally, it may seem that when you write a book review that is published on Amazon, you are just helping Amazon to make more money. This is true, but it is not a bad thing. You are also helping readers spend their reading dollars more effectively. It is a win-win situation. Moreover, you need not place your review just with Amazon. You can also post it on the sites of many other booksellers.
It is easier and cheaper than you might think to have your own dot-com. I've come close, but never bitten the bullet. You can find good advice about this all over the web, but don't be too gullible when you read about get rich schemes. The intention of a Dot-Com (or Dot-Org) does not need to be commercial at all. These are just another vehicle for web presence.