On Fri, 2008-05-02 at 00:20 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
What's "cognitive surplus"?
I believe Bogdan was using the term as described Clay in Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody" - http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/ - which made the front page of slashdot a few days ago: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/27/1422258
Essentially, it refers to the many person-hours of thought in a society that are not used for primary (work-hour) activities. While most of the cognitive surplus is spent on "passive" consumption of media (almost 2000 Wikipedias a year on sitcoms in the US alone), more and more is now invested in work that benefits society as a whole.
/Stian