the wisdom of clouds leaves me a little bit cloudy… that does not matter, because for some reason i do not want to follow your thoughts sentence by sentence this time. – still, we talked about cloudiness before and i was referring to myself as "cloudy around the fringes but pretty clear in the center".
looking at the way that i – and also quite some of my extremely well earning friends – make money nowadays, one can also see that individuals have an increasing number of sources of income nowadays. and i am not talking about one steady job and the rest comes as return from financial investments. – i am talking about the diplomat who actively runs a gallery for contemp art, i am talking about the fortune 100 manager who actively runs two restaurants, i am talking about the real estate developer who actively runs a high end furniture design boutique, the dentist who activelly runs a restaurant and a design store, the investment banker who has a serious second income from his earnings as one of the hottest party dj in town, the fiction author who is a management consultant and a well paid interior designer of bars…. and so on and so on.

i would call this "economies of fringes"

The combinatorial element stressed by Andrew a a above must be part of any explanation of increasing the number of ideas. The vast majority of these combinations, however, will not pass the intelligibility, social admissability, rich contestability, and illumination tests Grant lays out. I assume we have automatic filters that cause us to ignore unintelligible and inadmissable combinations, so we end up having to allocate scarce attention to screen ideas for contestability and illumination and then to think about the ones that get through the screen.

The proposal to add originality as a criterion for idea-hood has some conceptual problems. First is the old Seinfeld rerun problem: "If you haven't seen it before, it's new to you." In truth, there's no way to prove that any combination of thoughts hasn't been in some individual's head somewhere in the world over any given time period. How widespread does something have to be before we can say that repeating it is "unoriginal?" And what is the relevant community or network for that assertion? The second problem is that if we're talking about metaphors and such as ideas, each slightly new expression changes the meaning a bit, so that everything that is not a literal word-for-word copy is original.

But this originality issue is fruitful because it suggests that being hit with more ideas is as much a matter of greater exposure to ideas that have already been articulated as it is a matter of generating more new-to-the-world ideas.

This has been a very interesting set of posts.

I would argue that what you're getting at is this:

A) There are more *conversations* than there were before.

B) There are more *stories* than there were before.

Looking forward to the rest of this series.

As an avid reader of your blog, I wanted to drop a line and tell you how valuable I find it. I work primarily on the web, and have been doing so for almost a decade. When I worked for smaller agencies, I rarely had time to breath, let alone do some deep thinking. Now that I’m slightly more important (just slightly) and I can dedicate myself to expanding my understanding of social interaction online, I feel the quality of my work and the ultimately its value has risen sharply. Your blog continually spurs new ideas and insights for me, please keep up the good work.

I’m even beginning my own blog to communicate what I’ve learned to my company as a whole, and to outside readers. When I was putting together a list of my favorite blogs for others to read, yours came up first! Of course, I’d love a link back, but this message is honestly meant to convey my appreciation. With my own blog I’m definitely not going to reinvent the wheel, but I hope I can educate someone like you have me.

Really. You must stop smoking that wacky-backy!

Perhaps you should have consulted a Dictionary rather than any number of abstract philosophers.

Dictionary.com suggests than an idea is "any conception existing in the mind as a result of mental understanding, awareness, or activity"

By a simple process of deduction, if there are more people, there will be more ideas. They may be the same ideas, but that is not the proposition, just that there are more ideas.

Graham Hill