One woman. One long, hot Melbourne summer. 100 dates.

100 dates is an experiment in meeting people through crowdsourcing.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen a few references to #100dates.

#100 dates started as a way to amuse myself, and has turned into a way to hopefully amuse a few other people along the way as I throw caution to the wind and entrust my love life to the wisdom of the crowd (Sure it could all go horribly wrong, but all I’ve got to lose is my dignity and my life savings, right?).

We use online networking to find just about everything these days…. restaurant recommendations… a mechanic who won’t screw you… an article which explains how to install WordPress MU, or someone to take over your lease because your flatmate moved in with her boyfriend. I trust recommendations from my network for those kinds of things… so why not for more personal things, like meeting new people?

I don’t see 100 dates as another kind of online dating service. I’ve tried a few of them –  from RSVP to OK Cupid. And if men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then online dating services are definitely from Mos Eisley. SURELY the power of human recommendation can work better than those human sushi trains. Online profiles seem to make everyone seem like pale carbon copies of themselves. Everyone looks like they’re from the village of the damned. They’re DTE, have a GSOH, and they like dogs and walks on the beach. As soon as we sign up to one of those sites, our favourite movie is Amelie. We have no choice, we’ve been assimilated. I don’t know how it happens. I just want a decent alternative!

So… this is a dare I set myself. I want to meet lots of people, go out on dates and share the results for better or for worse. I’m going to look to my social network to recommend their awesome, eligible guy friends as potential dates. If I finesse it and it works, then I’ll think about turning 100 dates into a site or social network to help other people sign up to crowdsource a date, or recommend a single friend as a good date.

But for now, it’s just going to be my little experiment. You can follow it here, and on Twitter using the #100dates hashtag.

I’m going to start advertising through my social networks on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Dreamwidth for people to recommend me potential dates here in Melbourne. Hopefully it will be passed on and retweeted so I’ll start getting dates recommended to me by people I don’t even know. Variety is the spice of life and all that.

This blog will be where I talk about how I use my various social networks to put the word out and hopefully start getting people to think about & recommend the awesome single guys they know who, like me, would like to go out on a date with an interesting person.

In the interests of transparency, I should point out the very obvious, which is that I will be blogging about this process. I don’t intend to share gorey details here (sorry) and I’m happy to discuss personal limits about privacy with anyone who’s concerned. But I think if I was mocking people from #100dates that they’d stop agreeing to dates pretty quickly, so hopefully with manners and common sense, boundaries won’t be a problem.

So, any questions?