You can skip .NET or XML (eXtensible Markup Language)-RPC (Remote Procedure Call) or any of the other alphabet soup technologies being touted as the next best thing on the web—the real innovative stuff is at the edge. Here, for instance, or try Shredder 1.0 [1], a site that shreds other web pages to form art, or linguasso [2] (my personal favorite), which creates random works of art out of text.
And then there is the work jwz [3] has done, like the WebCollage [4], with its everchanging image of links.
[1] http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/shredder.html
[2] http://www.silenttransit.com/linguasso/index.php