Two days ago, Wayne Chiang was an odd Virginia Tech student with a love of guns and a number of social networking and blogging sites to his name. He was virtually unknown outside a small circle of friends.

Yesterday, for a matter of hours, he was falsely identified by cyber-sleuths as the shooter in the Virginia Tech horror and found himself vilified and slandered, the focus of racist hate messages and telephone death threats at his family home.

At the same time, Cho Seung-Hui, the real killer, was virtually invisible on the web. Searches on Google would have turned up at most two posts referring to other people who shared his name. Although he spent a lot of time on the web, he seemed to step lightly, leaving little of himself behind.

On Monday, he made his mark with a shooting spree that left 33 dead including himself and his name -- and words linked to his mass murder -- had grabbed several spots in nearly every top 10 search list.

His photo is now instantly recognizable and Cho will likely rest for a while in the pantheon of infamy alongside killers such as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.

It was an outpouring of commentary and prayer, of rage and rancour produced by thousands of people from all around the world who have no connection to the shooter, his victims or the school campus they shared.

The web -- and the average person's 24-hour-a-day mobile access to it -- has forever changed the way news is reported and experienced. Increasingly the line between creator and consumer, between reporter and reader, is being blurred as news outlets turn to citizen journalists and contributors for on-the-scene and first hand reports, photos and videos.

It may have taken Virginia Tech authorities nearly two hours to communicate the first pair of shootings via e-mail and the web. But within minutes of Cho's killing spree in Norris Hall, news flew out of the small town of Blacksburg, Virginia and made its way around the world in e-mails, text messages and postings on the social networking sites favoured by college students, Facebook and MySpace.

Within 30 hours of the shootings, copies of violent and disturbing plays Cho had written -- Mr. Beefcake and Mr. Brownstone -- had been posted on an ABC news and the Smoking Gun websites.

Meanwhile memorial sites sprang up by the thousands on social networking sites and long before any officials had confirmed any deaths, the victims' names and photos began appearing on those memorials, on photo sharing sites, on Wikipedia, and on the slightly gruesome MyDeathSpace website which specializes in linking to My Space web pages of the deceased.

Although much has been made of the potential of "citizen journalists" and the all-seeing eyes of cell phone cameras and video, the truth is there was very, very little of it on display here. It was mainly on short cell phone video, where gunshots can be heard and another cell phone photograph of students hunkered down in a classroom next door to Norris Hall.

But thousands of netizens weren't too busy to use the web to play cyber-detective, frantically chasing clues from one end of the Internet to the other in a desperate race for bragging rights to uncover the killer's identity ahead of the official release.

First, using an eyewitness description of the shooter as "Asian American," they set upon the gun loving Wayne Chiang and when that fell apart, linked to the photo of a Korean teaching in Indonesia who had a similar name.

Hundreds of bloggers spent much of yesterday trying -- and failing -- to uncover the meaning of the mysterious words "Ismail Ax" that Cho had allegedly signed on a rambling note he left behind and marked on his forearm in red ink.

But one thing the cyber sleuths did get right: an anonymous poster on a gun enthusiasts forum, Black-Rifles.com, 12 hours after the shootings correctly identified the weapons used and when one of them was purchased. The success, however, appears not to be a case of some cyber sleuth ferreting it out from an obscure online database. Rather, the post appears to have come from the man who sold Cho one of the guns.

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