The Internet can enable many things, and one of the most interesting ones is allowing people to trade with each other and not via shops and other intermediaries. The obvious example is here is Ebay, where people sell things to each other at a frenetic pace.

One of the more interesting sites that’s come to my attention in the last year is Zopa.com. Zopa enables “loans between people not banks”. Given the current state of collapse in the banking system, it could be that initiatives such as Zopa have more of an influence. There’s a long way to go, and it’s hard to tell how the various rates will play out in terms of their relationship to wider trends, but the concept is interesting. The next step will be to have greater autonomy of our own resources/money (at the moment the money still needs to be in a bank to be transferred to the person receiving the loan).

As the problems in the financial system begin to be felt in the ‘real economy’ and life gets a lot harder for all of us, I think it is crucial that we look to innovative uses of communications infrastructure to reorganise ourselves. Zopa is one small example of this and could be used in conjunction with more clearly community-focused initiatives such as local currency projects (eg the Totnes Pound).