What strange and exhilarating times we live in...  this "internet connectivity thing" in the early 21st century I mean.

In discussing the internet, Mark Pesce draws on the invention of the steam engine in 1712 - great enabler of the industrial revolution. He points out that the steam engine was originally used to pump water out of mines and that it was another 100 years before the steam engine was put to use in driving a locomotive. The implication being that "we don't know what we don't know" and that we early in the discovery process of how best to use this "internet thing".

The internet, of course, had the false start of the dot.com era - driven by venture capital and over hyped expectations. We can thank this period for some enormous infrastructure investment - much like the early over investment triggered by the railways boom.

And there is no doubt that our current usage of the internet is "early days" and  will be viewed as primitive in years to come. However, what strikes me is just the sheer acceleration of this process. The advent of social media in particular has witnessed a new army of millions move from passive to active media participants. This time, the innovation will have a wide base of innovators!

This is neatly described by others as the "cognitive surplus". This term, to me, conjures up a vision of  millions of crossword-playing, rubric cube solving and just plain curious folk out there descending on a new challenge - where the threshold for playing just got lowered.

Some of the early innovation is just taking existing real-world techniques and finding the optimal way to deploy them on the internet. I say "just", but we should not underplay the lessons learned in deploying to a new channel.

A good example of this is an Australian site that we recently encountered - Ideas while you sleep - where you can outsource your brainstorming "to the cloud" (recruited Ideas Agents) literally overnight - for a fee. This site brings together not only recruited ideas agents but sound brain-storming practices from the real world and incorporated them into an online environment.