As the weeks go by I’m more certain than ever that monetization of any intellectual capital-type efforts will be Internet-centric or people won’t give money in exchange for it — and, ironically, that giving value away over the Internet may become ‘table stakes’ to be in the content or software game.

Traditional distribution channels for intellectual capital (TV channels and non-online video, bookstores, video rental and music stores, industry publications and newsletters, learning in classroom or DVD, et al) can’t scale in the same way they can on the Internet. There is finite shelf space; it takes too long to deliver information when something is published and distributed; people want the information or training when they need it vs. when they can travel somewhere to learn it; and people are shifting their demand criteria anyway in a day of on-demand, always-available access.

Something you might not have considered is that people are also increasingly expecting complimentary sources for what they consume so they can get multiple points of view and perspective as well as having multiple sources to compare and from which to choose (it’s where my “experts don’t exist” mantra comes from since I demand more than one or two sources for anything). Shopping services; memetrackers to get multiple blogger points of view; voting sites (e.g., Digg) so the community decides which articles are most important and so on.

What’s unique in delivering intellectual capital-type efforts over the Internet is that more of us are expecting it to be delivered for free and many of us take advantage of it. The kicker? People simply taking the value without paying for it increases its intrinsic value IF the act of taking it in some way adds a form of personal perspective or influencer metadata above it and provides the intellectual capital-type efforts with more attention, importance, word-of-mouth buzz or informal guidance (premise based loosely on Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns).

Here are three examples.

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