"I believe that putting everything into a single data locker will be more secure, not less. Keep in mind that you'll have layers of privacy in your data locker, and you can put as many passwords and restrictions as you like on each one. You'll control who sees what, and you'll restrict anyone's access anytime you like."
Another troubling aspect of this more efficient and effective future is the unemployment that inevitably results from streamlining any industry or business. Indeed, this threat could be a major drag on momentum toward Web 3.0 (the semantic web). Siegel promises more jobs will be created, ones like "tagging," a task that a well-equipped, bright quadriplegic could do. Maybe. Here's what he says:
"The world's metadata will need a lot of tagging. Anyone with a mobile phone and a little training can improve metadata all day, even from a wheelchair or a goat pasture, and get paid for it."
Tagging is a critical aspect of the semantic web. Most of us are familiar with tagging as a way to search the web with keywords, highlight blog posts, indicate categories for filing and sorting images and advertising our interests in social media (Web 2.0). Power tagging is Siegel's term for "recording real-time facts and events from the real world, using common formats and vocabularies ... that mean the same thing to all systems." He discusses power tagging directly in a chapter on medicine, doctors and patients, possibly the scariest semantic web scenario, especially for the elderly, who interact with it the most. They may learn just how dangerous their current situations are or have their worst fears confirmed about their health care now.
Health care systems are just one of the several Siegel cites as examples of industries either needing or developing "pull" business models. In these customer-centric designs, all that tagging and personal metadata will pull to us goods, services, and information, rather than businesses constantly pushing their products at us. Isn't that what we call advertising? Pushing products?
Imagine yourself the center of your device mesh (every electronic gizmo you own from your cell phone and digital camera to a media room with touch display walls), master of your own fate, yet connected to everybody else.
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
And the world will live as one. ~ John Lennon
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.