The Power of Pull is Born
December 3, 2009
This site has been two years in the making. In the fall of 2007, I took the train to Cambridge, MA, to meet editors at the Harvard Business Press to pitch them on publishing my book, which at the time was to be called Business 3.0. At that meeting, they saw the vision and wanted me to write the book. Nine months and about 120,000 words later, we parted ways on friendly terms. I hadn’t delivered a book that was readable enough for a general business audience, and I needed to go back and rewrite it. I searched that summer for a new publisher. Since I’ve written three prior bestsellers about the Web and all of my books have been very profitable, I thought one of my old publishers would take the project. In fact, no publisher was willing to take on this visionary project, not even Tim O’Reilly, whom I consider a visionary several notches above me. Then I got the manuscript to Adrian Zackheim at Portfolio Press, and he loved the ideas. He also agreed it needed a major rewrite. I worked hard during the winter of 2009 to write a book I thought would be approachable and portray my vision for the future. Fortunately, my writing improved at the same time as the Semantic Web actually started to take shape. Several of my early predictions came true even before I finished the final manuscript.
I have always envisioned this site as a hub for the semantic web and the principles of Pull. Its goal is to accelerate a movement that Tim Berners Lee started in the late 1990s and is finally gathering momentum. You can learn a lot here, but you can also help. If you are reading these words, you are welcome to join me and thousands of people working to make this world a reality. I invite you to contribute research, knowledge, links, news, advice, corrections, comments, tweets – anything that helps other people learn more about the semantic web and pull. Just start right in, or contact us if you have any suggestions.
It’s still early. We are about 1% of the way toward this new way of thinking and working. But it’s coming. Check back in often. Help it grow.
David Siegel
