I wrote this yesterday about similar, and Pete obsoleted it. http://bit.ly/fatsurfer Great stuff, Pete!
"Down the road there will definitely be a need for data marketplaces, common platforms where producers and consumers of large information sets can connect, just as there are for other commodities." MS is entering this area with project "Dallas" on their Azure platform: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/dallas/default.aspx
Nice write-up, though it does seem to skirt the notion that for many businesses users are not the customers, they are the product. User data is sold to to the real customers.
Also thanks Pete for not using the word "monetize" since I read it right after breakfast.
Good article. I'm actually finishing up a small side project about data that we originally built for ourselves to do some market research, but we are planning to release to the public for a monthly fee.
Interesting article. Did anyone of you guys tried to sell some dataset to infochimps.com? This could be lucrative, but I have no idea how many people buy this stuff.