The Paid Piper - NYTimes.com A friend told me: "If you're looking to make some money on the side, you should try Gidsy.com, it's totally up your alley." Because it seems lately that no occupation is anywhere near my alley, I checked out this funny-named start-up ("gids" is the Dutch word for "guide") in the hope that my friend was right. Started in November 2011, the Web site is a Berlin-based outfit that enables travelers and other novelty seekers to find activities organized by what it refers to as "real people." Via Gidsy, genuine humanoids like you and me can monetize our expertise, creativity, access, skills or local knowledge by turning them into tours and activities offered for a price (and advertised through social networks that the site seamlessly integrates). Have access to a hot-air-balloon ride over Luxor's temples at sunrise? Know how to make buttons in your Berlin apartment? Chances are someone will pay to join you. Each activity organizer sets his or her own price, and Gidsy takes 10 percent - a tribute that will eventually trickle up to the coffers of Ashton Kutcher, one of the firm's principal investors. It's no coincidence that Kutcher would put money into Gidsy; it's a logical extension of sites like Airbnb (also in Kutcher's portfolio of investments) that aim to democratize travel knowledge and capitalize on the Internet's D.I.Y. spirit. A social media vacation, then, might involve consulting TripAdvisor to find a deal on flights, Airbnb for a place to stay and Gidsy for stuff to do while you're in town. I decide that my tours will combine two or more aspects of my life and interests, excluding the amusing but impractical coupling of "5k Run plus Guitar Lesson." Within a couple of hours, people browsing Gidsy are offered "Scorsese's Downtown Manhattan Tour," in which I take movie fans to various locations featured in three of the director's films; "A Running Tour of Manhattan," wherein I whisk a huffing, puffing group along Hudson River Park, alerting them to points of interest; "A Historical Walking Tour of Occupied New York," filled with mildly insightful musings on the British administration of New York City from 1776 to 1783; and a "Manhattan Kayak Tour," in which I fuse the tedium of barely memorized factoids about the Hudson River with the exhilaration of possibly drowning in poison. Eventually, I get a bite. Edial Dekker, a 28-year-old Dutchman living in Berlin, expresses a good deal of interest in my kayaking tour and politely asks if I can schedule one during his visit to New York in October. I'm not especially surprised to discover that Dekker is, in fact, the company's co-founder. Without disclosing that I would be writing about the experience, I tell Dekker that the Hudson River is too cold in October, and he inquires whether there might be some other way I can amuse him and his brother, Floris, who is also a Gidsy co-founder (along with a third partner, Philipp Wassibauer), on their trip. But based on the current low level of interest in my offerings, my career as a guide might be over by then. With few takers, I begin tweeting about my capers and describing them on Facebook with instructions for my people to retweet and repost. Still no takers. So I slash my prices and add more tours. On Gidsy, if an activity doesn't enlist the minimum number of people set by the organizer within 24 hours of its start time, it's automatically canceled. One by one, I receive automated e-mails telling me that what I have to offer has failed to capture anyone's imagination and that my event is being called off due to barely contained lack of interest. The Occupied New York and Scorsese walking tours are the first to be nixed, followed by the running tour. I decide to post another activity, something that's quintessentially me and that I don't have to cram for: scavenging food. You see, earlier in my writing career I had to become creative in how I housed, clothed and fed myself. I started by recovering bags of discarded, barely stale bagels and soon discovered that there were luxury food items being given away all over town. In a short while, I had amassed a wealth of knowledge on the best spots and the best times for grazing. Thankfully, it's been a while since I've depended on free food for sustenance. So I spend a day scouring my old haunts to see if the pickings were still plentiful. Though we live in financially trying times, the volume of food being thrown out is greater than ever. I hurry home and write a post. Free food samples are designed to guilt-trip people into making a purchase. But hold your nerve and you could eat the equivalent of a three-course meal, absolutely free! I'll take you on a tour of New York City's best free-food locations. Over a 2-3 hour span, I guarantee to fill you to your bursting point with delectable morsels, gratis! After several tweets, retweets, posts and reposts, I get nine takers, and we set a meeting time, 6 p.m. on Thursday in Chelsea. I focus on that neighborhood because it promises the highest concentration and greatest diversity of free food. Not only is Chelsea Market the gourmet freeloader's one-stop shop, it's also near the Thursday-night art-gallery openings, which are generally stocked with free wine and nibbles. Before we set out, I quickly give the group - now down to six - a few pointers on boldness and tell them they'll get extra credit for going back for seconds. I hand them all zip-lock sandwich bags and tell them not to let being full stand in the way of collecting samples that can be saved (even frozen!) for later. We begin at Wrapido, a Middle Eastern joint on Eighth Avenue. Here, a tray of bite-size falafel chunks are placed on a pedestal on the sidewalk. After five minutes of conspicuous loitering while we wait for a fresh batch, the group descends upon the tray like a swarm of locusts as flabbergasted cooks peer through the window. Then we hoof it to Chelsea Market, where I know about a wine tasting at Chelsea Wine Vault that is on until 7. We bum-rush the woman from Stark Thirst - a winery in Sonoma County - and each have a splash of a crisp, clean unoaked chardonnay. One of the group even wants to buy a bottle, but I remind her that spending money is anathema to the ethos of the tour. Later, however, someone else breaks the rule by buying a crunchy cheddar from Vermont that we tasted at Lucy's Whey. After sampling a dozen types of infused olive oil at the Filling Station, we check into L'Arte del Gelato, where I demonstrate to the group how not to be cowed by eye rolling. When it comes to ice cream, the usual custom is "two tries then buy." Despite a salvo of tsking I make it to five unchallenged tries. But the rest of the group can't handle the contempt, which is just as well because being upstaged by newbie moochers would be shameful. We're already 10 minutes behind schedule when we unexpectedly pass several food carts on the High Line that have started the process of calling it a night. The hipster pedant running the Northern Spy Food Co. cart tells me that it wouldn't be "food safe" to give me the items he's in the process of throwing away because they contain dairy. You have nothing without dairy? I ask. Begrudgingly he hands me two large hot biscuits. "They've been in the oven awhile," he says. They might not be great. But oh, they are! The seven of us tear at the biscuits like a pack of wolves pulling apart a rabbit. One of my group simply asked the guys from another truck if we could sample their cooking before they shut off their grill. The two chefs make three types of miniature tacos for us, which we all agree are exquisite. We have to eat our tacos on the hoof lest the food and wine at the galleries be ransacked. At the Hpgrp Gallery on 20th Street, I'm elated to see 10 bottles of red and white wine and three people ready to distribute it. "We ran out of cups," one says apologetically. "We just sent out for more," another says. These people are trying to give us wine but can't and it's maddening! We descend on what's left of the crudité and potato chips, slipping some oily macadamia nuts into our zip-lock bags, then cut our losses and head to Pace Gallery on 25th Street, where waiters offer us water. No wine? "All out," says one. So I herd the gang to a couple of more galleries where our indifference to the art raises a few eyebrows but where the food tables are groaning with wine, Champagne, pita triangles, feta-stuffed olives and chocolate wafer straws. Both places are on upper floors, which confirms my theory that upstairs galleries are much less likely to have their food and wine offerings scoured by opportunists. You can take that tidbit to the bank. A few days later, I get back in touch with Edial Dekker to let him know that I am a writer and that I enjoyed being a guerrilla tour guide enough to reprise the role when he and his brother are in town. He tells me that Gidsy was born after he and his brother had trouble organizing a group to venture into the German countryside to pick mushrooms and then make a mushroom risotto. "So we thought there was a market opportunity and we started thinking about how to connect people with experiences with a social component," he says. They started with a cooking class, followed by a seminar on how to create a start-up. It was their pals at the popular app SoundCloud who mentioned them to Ashton Kutcher, who, says Dekker, "was just totally behind the idea. He immediately got that we were bringing people together. Dekker hopes that eventually Gidsy will become a common tool for anyone looking for fun - or educational or silly or random - stuff to do and fun people to do it with. "You don't have to be traveling," he says. Meeting people doing interesting things in the city you live in is like traveling on a whole other level.