Every weekday in September (except the 7th), I’m going to send someone a copy of my book, Pull. Your chances of winning are quite good, because on any given day not that many people will enter. (I am indebted to Scott Bourne for this contest idea – if you are a photographer you should definitely follow him.) Here are the contest rules:

1. You must be 18 years or older to enter. You may not be an employee of Penguin or Portfolio Press.
2. If you live in the US, Canada, or Puerto Rico, I will pay the shipping for the book. If you live outside these countries, you will have to Paypal me the shipping amount before I will send you the book.
3. You must have a Twitter account and be following me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/PullNews
4. You must send the tweet below EXACTLY as it is written with no changes. You can only send this tweet once. You’re welcome to tweet it as often as you like, but only the first time counts.
5. At the end of every day (by midnight Eastern Standard Time), I’ll choose one person at random who is a) following me and b) sent the tweet for the first time. I’ll send this person a direct message on Twitter asking for his/her address. I will send the book, signed, within a week or so. (Random numbers generated by Random.org)
6. If you live outside the US, you’re responsible for any taxes, duties, or delays.
7. This is for physical books only, no eBooks will be given away.
8. If you don’t win, the book is available at all online bookstores and isn’t very expensive. Just click on the book cover at right. It will probably change your life, so please get it and read it, and if you don’t find it worth the cover price and can tell me exactly why, I’ll refund your money personally. So there. You can’t lose!

Here is the tweet to send, exactly as you see it below (do NOT use a URL shortener, it fits just fine):

Win a free business strategy future semantic web book from @PullNews. Pls RT. Info: http://thepowerofpull.com

If this is your first time to my web site, it’s huge. There are a lot of resources here. I encourage you to read the blogs, below, and to explore the links on the left. There’s a beginner section, a bookstore, a good place to learn definitions, and much more. In addition, here are some of my more (in)famous blog posts:

An Open Letter to Ray Ozzie
I Have a Dream – the Semantic Collaborative Work Space
An Open Letter to Steve Ballmer
Looking for a CEO to Help me Take On Facebook

And many more. You’re sure to learn something from my tweet stream, and those who want to follow my personal tweets are welcome to (emphasis on photography, kids, travel, and wacky ideas). Please tell business people about my book. And, if you know any journalists, tell them they can interview me and they won’t be sorry.

I’ll be back in October with two insightful blogs per week and to keep you updated on my quest to start the online data locker company.

David Siegel

By the way, if you know business people or professors in business schools, please ask them to take a look at my book. And if you’ve read it and would review it at your favorite online bookstore, I would really appreciate any honest reviews.

It starts with a business partner. This project is too big for me to do by myself. I need to get funding, build a team, design the experience, translate that into code, ship a beta, and get ten million people onto the platform before anyone else does. For that, I need to focus, and to focus while doing everything else right, I need a business partner. Here’s what I’m looking for, someone who:

• Preferably lives in the Bay Area or in New York.
• Has a strong track record as an entrepreneur – at least 3 successful exits.
• Has taken investors’ money and provided good returns for them.
• Has built a consumer-facing company or one with very high customer service.
  
• Is all about execution – much better at executing than at vision.
• Is a great manager and has a long list of people who would gladly work for her/him again.
• Wants to build a culture of openness and support for employees.
• Understands and enjoys sales.
• Understands and loves building partnerships – has a big Rolodex of partner companies to call on.
  
• Is ready for a big adventure.
  
• Understands the value of open standards.
• Appreciates that some or much of a company’s code can be open source.
  
• Does not need a salary initially and is motivated by stock.
  
• Reads my book and gets excited.
  
• Reads my previous blogs and gets more excited.
  
• Appreciates my role and sees a good fit between us.
• Has the desire to build something big by starting small.
  

As I’ve said, I think I can get the funding for this project. It will need a lot of money, and I believe I know where it will come from.

I’m hoping people will read this and spread the word. Please tweet about it and reach out to your networks to help me find the right person, so we can build the next big company together.

I’m sorry I haven’t been very regular in posting this summer. I will try to post once a week, and you can find my tweets @PullNews. I’m spending much of my time on the vision and the team for my new startup to build the personal data locker. Once I find a good CEO, things will start rolling. I’ve had good talks with several people who can help with business development, and I’m talking with one potential CEO. I’d be interested to talk with or meet other potential CEOs in New York or San Francisco. I really want someone who thinks “start small, get big” and can help me bring a Facebook alternative to consumers who want to own their information, and they want their information to do much more for them than it does today.

I’ve been thinking about social democracy. Facebook is really social communism – Facebook makes the rules, and everyone has to play by them. Even if there are thousands of applications, you still have to read this week’s Terms of Service to see what you can and cannot do with your data. Facebook’s privacy policy is now 5,830 words long and getting longer and more confusing all the time. The same is true with iPhone and iPad apps – it’s nice that Apple plays the gatekeeper to keep us all safe, but I’m not sure I trust Apple to know what’s good for me and what isn’t. (If I’ve paid full price and signed up for a two-year contract, why shouldn’t I be able to use my phone on any other network I also pay for?) Sites like Plaxo and LinkedIn are helpful, but once again, they own your data, and you couldn’t close your account if you wanted to. And we all know that Microsoft is just a listless hulk of scrap iron surrounding $44 billion in cash floating in deep space.

If you’re thinking of leaving Facebook, there’s a site called QuitFacebookDay.com where you can get support. And, if you’re having problems deleting your account at any of these “Roach Motel” web sites, a company called Abine wants to help you.

There are new companies that want to eat Facebook’s lunch, but most of them still use the Roach Motel model of trapping users. Two recent launches are Me.me, by Yahoo, and LifeStream, by AOL. (Too bad, I really liked the LifeStream name.) These are well designed services that want to replace your Facebook and Twitter interfaces with a seamless place to spend your time, but they won’t be any better than Facebook in the long run, because they aren’t open.

What we need is true social democracy – a place where people can finally put all their personal information and know that they will always be able to control it. A place where people can make contributions and everyone will benefit. A place that gets safer and safer as more people help build it. A place that gives you full control over the kinds of relationships you have with people and the access you give them to your information. A place where you can point your automatic “data exhaust” – places you go, purchases, web surfing, people you come into contact with, places you eat, places you stay, things you like, etc. – and it will be yours to manage or delete according to your desires. A place that, one day, will drive all your devices and make you truly device independent.

As I’m working on the business plan for the new company, I’m also working on a Social Democracy Bill of Rights for users. This is a draft. Feel free to suggest additions or changes:

Anyone who has a data locker …

• Can choose to host it anywhere, on any machine that will accept it. This means you choose your hosting company. Just like WordPress – you will have a choice of places to host your data locker, including your own server under your control.
• Can easily move the entire account to a new hosting facility anytime. You may start your personal data locker at MercedesBenz.com, Out.com, Visa.com, or Harvard.edu. At any time and for any reason, you will be able to move your entire account to another hosting platform with no questions asked.
• Has the ability to create rich networks of friends and acquaintances that closely reflects the relationships in real life. No one has 500 friends. The more you can specify the exact relationships you have with people and put them into meaningful groups, the more those online relationships will work for you online.
• Can delete it at will. Since your data is all in one place, you should be able to CRUD your data – Create, Read, Update, and Delete it. I would suggest making a back-up first, but it’s up to you.
• May choose the security layers that surround his/her data. Using open standards, you should be able to surround your data with whatever levels of security you like. If you want to make certain information as secure as possible, you may have to pay extra for it, but you should have a huge range of choices when it comes to security.
• Controls which information is public and which is private. You should be able to list everything you own on your personal data locker, put it on the open web, and receive offers for anything you own without having to list it on eBay or Craigslist or any other web site. But you don’t have to. You’ll control what’s public, what the bots can see, and what they can’t.
• Has as many logins as he/she wants to have. You can create as many login names and passwords as you like, but the beauty of the system is that you’ll be able to have one login with the data locker, and use it to log into any services or sites you want to use online. That means you can get rid of your passwords on all those web sites and let them refer to your data locker, which then authenticates you as the person you say you are. This may sound complicated, but it’s much more secure than what we have today, and the technology for “federated login” is ready to deploy.
• Can have as many data lockers as he/she likes. Ideally, you have just one, but if you want to have multiple lockers, that’s okay. If you have a separate “persona,” you may want to create a second one. For example, if you want to make secret travel plans for a getaway with someone special, you may want to use a different persona than you normally use. It’s up to you.
• Can add new facets any time. You’ll start with a number of standard facets, like personal, family, work, resume, hobbies, travel, finance, real estate, accounts, activities, etc. You may, for example, have a facet devoted to managing your car’s data, and you may have your data hosted at MercedesBenz.com, where the nice marketing people at Mercedes Benz want you to have a fully branded experience. But, if you buy a Range Rover or a Porsche then you’ll also be able to have a fully branded experience to manage your new car, and in fact your “manage my cars” facet will be able to combine the information from all your vendors into one seamless view, so you can see how you’re managing your cars, fuel, maintenance, etc. The same would go for airlines, hotels, restaurants, etc. No single vendor will be able to prevent other vendors from adding information to your data locker, even if your locker is hosted on their servers.
• Has a platform for doing vendor relationship management. You’ll manage all your marketing data here, and you’ll be able to work with vendors on your terms. As I talk about in my book, most people would rather manage a house full of products in a single web site than having to go to dozens of web sites to log in and use information. The data locker is the infinitely-expandable platform for working with vendors on your terms, keeping control of what information they get and how they use it.
• Can freely exchange information with anyone or any service. You’ll be responsible for obeying the law and using your data locker responsibly. We won’t be playing “Big Brother” in the background.
• Can freely use any app that will work with his/her data. There will be an app store, where you can buy or add apps to your data locker (thank god there are no more downloads!). In fact, there could be many app stores. We won’t have any central control over the apps available. I expect, however, there will be various filtering mechanisms for finding apps that meet certain expectations or criteria.
• Is part of a community that helps share data. If you want to hook your schedule to your online travel advisor, you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. The data locker will have a community of people building data pipes (APIs) that help make their data lockers much more useful, and those data pipes will go into the public domain via a nonprofit entity set up for this purpose. We’ll build the open standards we all need without increasing the spaghetti of proprietary data standards.

That’s all I have for now, but I’m sure there will be more as the company takes shape. I’ll let you know how things are going. If you can think of a great name or domain name for the personal data locker, or if you know a great CEO for me, please get in touch.