I had a fascinating breakfast conversation this morning with a couple of Really Smart Guys: Alan Cohen, Cisco Systems' vice president for mobility solutions, and Techdirt analyst Carlo Longino. We started out talking about Cisco's efforts to unify disparate forms of communications and connectivity across enterprises, and about the dreaded buzzword "collaboration," which has risen once again to the top of just about everyone's lips at Interop. After a while, though, we were discussing how new Web-based collaborative tools (Wikis, Web conferencing, online project management systems, blogs, etc.) will transform not only traditional ways of doing business but conventional notions of credit and blame.

Cohen cited the example of last week's Apple/Engadget debacle, in which $4 billion worth of Apple's market value was vaporized in a few minutes after Engadget posted a bogus email saying that the launch of the iPhone would be delayed by several months.

"Who was playing whom?" Cohen asked. Was the phony internal email "leaked" by an Apple short-seller, by Apple insiders hoping to keep the pre-launch buzz for the iPhone simmering, by an Engadget contributor? Who knows? In a Web 2.0 world, sources are blurred, blame (or credit) is often impossible to apportion, and identifying the culprit(s) is just another form of paranoia.

When college students see little distinction between collaboration and what has traditionally been called "plagiarism," and when business models arise from casual conversations, online message boards, and overheard airport-lounge remarks, the traditional Western ideas of individual creativity and intellectual property get might murky mighty fast.

In a terrific 2003 story in Wired, my former colleague Thomas Goetz demonstrated how open-source methods of collaboration and creation are spreading beyond software to many different disciplines, particularly scientific and engineering fields, to transform the way people work and the way they think about work.

"Proprietary models built on traditional notions of intellectual property" are being "undone by irresistible forces," Goetz maintained.

In his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, William Gibson created a beautiful, slightly haunting meditation on new forms of authorship and creation, centered around a "mysterious collection of video moments, merely called "the footage," let loose onto the Internet by an unknown source."

Even the federal government has attempted to get into the online collaboration act (whatever happened to the Overseas Presence Interagency Collaboration/Knowledge Management System, launched in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, anyway?).

For businesses these new forms of getting work done are going to create a new era of marked productivity gains, according to Cohen's boss John Chambers. I'm not quite as confident about that as Chambers, but I do think he's onto something. The question becomes, when traditional notions of individual creativity and organizational hierarchy go the way of the fax machine, how will companies identify and reward their highest performers? Who gets the credit for innovation and the blame for screwups when it's all just a big Wiki?