Great innovation is great in large part because of context. Context separates invention from innovation. Context is like the frame in art. If the canvas doesn't fit the frame, the whole thing doesn't quite work.

When this [Web 2.0] model allows many new ideas, then the cost of solving problems and of generating content will go down. It also means the cost and the need for filtering will go up. You will need to filter not only for what's good versus what's bad but also for what fits your strategy. Not every idea will work given your asset base, your strengths, and your differentiation. The challenge will not be to find the smart people or ideas but to find a way to teach your whole company to filter on the same set of ideas.

We think of a medium as a thing that delivers content. But the delivered content is a medium in itself. The many forms of content we collect and experience online are really just forms of ammunition, an excuse to start a discussion with that attractive person in the next cubicle...

That's why the most successful TV shows, Websites, and music recordings are generally the ones that offer the most valuable forms of social currency to their fans...

If you are creating online content, your success will be directly dependent on your ability to create excuses for people to talk to one another. The real measure of content's quality is how well it serves as a medium.

The next big thing for the Internet and humanity alike, then, is the realization that our media has served as little more than excuse to interact with one another. Once we make that leap, we will most likely come to wonder what it's all for. Why do we have this overwhelming urge to interact by any means (or medium) available?

In the old days, things didn't change quite so fast, and media or more accurately genres with a given medium had a chance to stabilize. Then we would subconsciously appropriate a genre and know how to read the content through the lenses of that genre. But today things are changing so rapidly that you don't have that much stability in many of the genres which actually makes reading content more complicated. People tend to forget the social resources we use that scaffold our ability to interpret things, to make sense out of the content.