Sampling isn't about "hijacking nostalgia wholesale," says Mark Ronson. It's about inserting yourself into the narrative of a song.

Marty Note
You may want to jump to time code 3:00 as Ron's first mix goes on a tad long, but stay with this TED talk. What Mark shares about music is true for marketing and content curation - we (content curators) don't "hijack" content wholesale either.

Content curation is about inserting ourselves into the narrative of a piece of content just as I am doing here with Mark's TED talk. I'm "sampling" Mark's thoughts, video and intellectual "property" to cross the Rubicon between music and marketing, listening and creating, consuming and collaborating.

Yes, there are revolutionary original works such as Mark Schaefer on Content Shock (http://www.businessesgrow.com/2014/01/06/content-shock/ ), David Amerland on our new value system (http://helpmyseo.com/seo-blog/692-what-if-we-had-a-new-value-system-for-goods-and-services.html) and Curagami's co-founder Phil Buckley on Fear, Shame and Asking For Help (http://www.curagami.com/featured/fear/ ).

Even these fiercely original works are woven from memes, ideas and threads sampled from others. Just as we can hear Bowie in Vanilla Ice we hear Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and Brian Solis in Mark, David and Phil's thinking and ideas. We sample, remix and mesh because we can.

We sample remix and mes because its fun and challenging too. The most important marketing idea today may be finding new methods and applications for making your products, thoughts and ideas be "sample worthy".