Here comes Mark Zuckerberg's knowledge economy

It's Mark Zuckerberg's knowledge economy now. And the rest of us just share information inside it. Or at least, that is how it appears to Mark Zuckerberg.

The term "knowledge economy" has been around for a couple of decades. In the 1990s, it was one of those infuriatingly vague buzzwords favored by writers and consultants who gave it such a broad definition it ultimately had little meaning. The age of information was dawning, its primary raw material was creative brainpower. Ever since Facebook blew away its earnings three months ago, the company's CEO has been peppering conference calls with the term. This month, when Facebook again blew past Wall Street's estimates, he and other executives used the phrase eight times. In appropriating the term to describe Facebook's long-term strategy, Zuckerberg has refined the definition. In a Washington Post op-ed last April 2013, Zuckerberg wrote that "Today's economy... is based primarily on knowledge and ideas -- resources that are renewable and available to everyone."