Pack your personal data locker. We're about to leave for camp. Some fear it will be the kind of camp where Jason shows up to hack into their identities. For others, it looks like a posh resort where wants and needs are fulfilled automatically, often before they are conscious desires. Reality, of course, will lie somewhere along a continuum from heaven to hell, and possibly in the Twilight Zone.
David Siegel explains that your online locker will be filled with bits of the semantic web: clear, unambiguous words and numbers in standardized formats, commonly called "metadata." Presently, it's scattered all over the Internet in multiple and redundant data silos. Don't let the computer terms scare you away. He uses only necessary ones and explains them well. This is disambiguation at its best. His vision of the future, 10, 20, 30 years from now, is densely packed with enough material for several books. He includes references to groups already demonstrating or working on the "pull" economy. ThePowerOfPull.com website website will contain the links he lists, enabling readers to research and follow our progression into the future.
His vision places so much online that it almost fulfills authors' wishes to send thoughts directly into computers to produce books. And it all begins with that "personal data locker" not mentioned until Chapter 8: Passive Commerce, 100 pages into Pull. The focus until then is on businesses, but the center of businesses is customers, not profit, in the pull economy. Individual people comprise customers, each with unique characteristics, preferences and needs, even when they congregate into another business or organization.
Pull suggests what's to come through concrete examples of:
- Which industries are already ahead.
- Which industries are already dead.
- How to make the power shift from pushing to pulling information.
- How software, hardware, media and marketing will all change.
- How to plan your own strategy for embracing the semantic web.
Future businesses will need access to all pertinent information about customers. How much more efficient would it be if that data were stored in one place, under the control of its owner?
"But, but, someone might use that against me!" a horrified woman in a Starbucks said after listening to a brief description of Pull. "You hear about hackers breaking into this and that database every day!" She has a good point, one Siegel somewhat glosses over. He theorizes that we are safer with all our data aggregated, but without explaining how or why.
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Article comments
1 - david siegel
Georganna, great write-up! Thank you! I agree that privacy and security are concerns. I had an entire privacy and security chapter, but my editors thought it was too technical, and I agreed. My book is for a forward-thinking audience, one that is willing to engage in thinking about this kind of future. These people will take the book as a starting point. They will want to know more, not just about privacy and security concerns, but about ontologies, data lockers, passive commerce, semantic marketing, the performance business model, and much more. That's why I'm building a huge resource online to help them take the next step. It's just getting started, but you can find it at www.thepowerofpull.com. I hope people will come and discuss the issues, learn and share what they have learned, and contribute to a community that can see the future I describe and want to make things better.
There's no question that 100% of my predictions won't come true. But if 50% of what I talk about in my book does come true, the world is going to be a very different place. I invite the curious to read it and decide for themselves how real it is. And how real it could be if we all started to think a bit differently about information.
Thanks again for taking your time to write this excellent review. Seems that if people of your stature and influence are on board, this movement could go places. That's why I wrote the book in the first place.