I had a surge of motivation sparked by a lot of serious reading over the last few months. I presented a talk on “Big Data in the Context of Big History” this past October at the General Semantics Conference in New York, and I’ve got a good chunk of an ambitious paper in progress. It incorporates a fast synopsis of the story I’m seeking to tell in The Purpose Driven Web, and compares Big Data to the Semantic Web, arguing that both technologies radically enable the call of well-sourced, graphable objects. And I might have something interesting to say about Babbage.

Reading about Marshall McLuhan has raised new insights about our powers of mimicry and the figure/ground implications of how people experience of the Web. I’m going to take stab at creating a video worthy of uploading. Before long I’ll put something up about the three thresholds of Web development I’ve identified… Hyper-linking, Hyper-mixing, and Hyper-sourcing… and how they activate our experiences of surfing, streaming, and what might come to be called zooming.

So first I figured out how to create a new YouTube channel called Secular Progress, and I then picked out a great video to commemorate its launch.