Quote from sci-fi novel Accelerando by Charles Stross:

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything. There are drawbacks however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of a future shock - he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current

Why do I blog this? This description seems to fit as the next step for "symbolic analysts" described by Robert Reich (in The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century). In this book, Reich developed a metaphor for the modern worker: the Symbolic Analyst, who identify, solve and broker problems by manipulating symbols/knowledge. Does Reich's definition will be expanded to Stross sci-fi description? using tools such as Amazon Mechanical Turk or innocentive-like places might be a first step towards this.