Bob Noel writes:

I've been thinking of building an interface to Airnav that would allow
people to submit prices/comments both to Airnav *and* a public
repository simultaneously. (I'd provide an initial interface to it
but everyone else would be welcome to the data.) Is there interest?

or maybe let people post to rec.aviation.products, and provide
a focused "google". Did that make any sense?

It makes a lot of sense to me and I'd normally be one of the first to
suggest a Usenet-based solution. This time, however, it's not so clear
that it's the best distribution medium. I can imagine collecting the
prices and comments from posted messages, but it could get ugly fast -
especially prices, if they're kept reasonably current. I like to
encourage the use of Google, but I even worry about it being a
proprietary database.

I think it would be great, however, if someone built a mechanism to
post comments and even significant price changes back to Usenet.

Of course one of my biggest concerns about any such community-managed
system is authentication. I'd like all comments to be signed in some
form with a trust network so that we can easily separate the signal
from the noise. I have ideas for that.

--kyler