In order to begin paying recommenders, we'll need to start taking in revenue by processing sales transactions for songs and other forms of creative content. To get musicians and writers and so forth excited about including us among the sites where they upload their work for sale, we'll need to draw some noticeable consumer traffic.

How to get past this chicken-and-egg situation?

Even in our current state, where we simply provide links to creative work on other sites, we offer meaningful incentives for content creators as well as recommenders to participate.

Not least of these is a better chance to have their work recognized and appreciated.

Other incentives include:

• Increased traffic to taste mavens' own blogs or other web sites, based on their names being displayed in clickable links accompanying their recommendations.
• Initial-discoverer status on all the content our mavens establish the first links to on Pinpointer, entitling them to a significant share of later revenue from Pinpointer sales.
• A personal recommendations gallery for each taste maven, with its own unique URL and built-in suite of advanced content discovery tools. With this, visitors to their blog no longer have to scroll backwards in time through every post in order to find the kinds of content recommendations they're actually interested in at the moment. The blog becomes more attractive—at the same time it does more good for the musicians.
• A prestige boost from helping good local bands connect better with the public.
• Most of all, the satisfaction that comes from doing a good and worthwhile thing.