Ebay for dates.

The person being searched sets how many contacts per period they are willing to accept, and the date is auctioned off. Revenues are split between the people search company and the individual.

What???

nice writeup, and i agree arrington is a tough but fair — and interesting — moderator (that is, if he’s not up on his soapbox… which can also be interesting… sometimes

anyway i agree there’s more to be figured out on tag spam and monetization, but i don’t think the situation is impossible. wikipedia has obviously learned how to get the community & community moderators to produce a mostly reasonable set of reference pages, so the “community handwaving” may be a bit fuzzy at the moment, but that still doesn’t mean it’s bullshit.

in particular with Spock, tags have transparency as to which person (or source, if not a person) created and/or voted on the tag. that user has to be a registered Spock user, so there is the ability to see thru to who made the tag. while i don’t know the exact methods or algorithms for managing low-volume or hi-volume tag votes, i think they’ll have some ability to modulate obvious tag spam.

on the other hand, one person’s spam could be another person’s opinion… so i’m sure there will be a good bit to learn on how to manage all of the community aggregated tagging without seeming like a graffiti board. should be interesting to watch it unfold.

[full disclosure: i'm an advisor/consultant to Spock... altho i find all of the services mentioned above + LinkedIn interesting to use for people search. fascinating topic]

- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com