Long Overdue Update

As somewhat expected, our combined efforts to sustain a vibrant blog haven’t amounted to much, ah well! Anyway, I thought it was about time for an update.

Just because we haven’t been updating the blog, doesn’t mean we haven’t been working on the site – there has been plenty of tinkering and experimenting going on with it. We’re tipping in at just over 270 members, the majority have either made a successful trade or advertised a trade. Obviously the more members the better, so tell your friends!

You may have seen a major change in the design and layout. Instead of categorising by the type of good or service that the member wants to trade we decided to organise the site by location. The reasoning behind this being that people are generally much more flexible on what they want to trade than where they live. It also reinforces the local nature of barter while allowing us to expand the site neatly as well as letting us use the fetching map on the front page! At the moment we’re trying it out with Ireland, hopefully soon we’ll start adding other countries.

Also to help find what you’re looking people can colour code their ads depending on the service they’re offering. Our main goal is to make the whole process, if there are any ways you can think of to make the whole barter process run smoother or if you’ve any feedback on the new design then let us know in the comments.

Aside from all that our latest media exposure came and went a few weeks ago on RTE’s Living Lightly, a series on how to live a better life on a lower budget. One of our members was featured on the show and used Swop-o-nomics to get a website built for himself in exchange for some electrical work.

Finally our latest bit of excitement is the partnership we’ve just announced with Nurture Development, experts in Asset Based Community Development (ABCD conveniently enough!). The basic idea behind ABCD is help local economies better use the assets and resources that they already have. This isn’t always something that can organise itself which is where Nurture Development come in. The plan behind the partnership is that we can provide dedicated local area sections of the site for the locations Nurture Development are working with, both bringing new members to the site and helping keep trade within local economies, it’s win win!

You can read a bit more about this here.

Well that’s it for the update, hopefully it won’t be too long until the next but sure you know how blogs go!

What a difference a week makes.

It’s been a busy week at Swop-o-nomics. When we weren’t fending off paparazzi I was getting weird looks for walking down busy streets with me in my brand new (well, circa 1970) rubber gas mask.

So as you might expect, we’re really pushing to get the word out about the site, the more members and visitors, the better it gets. We got a little bit of much welcomed media attention this week. Gerry and ermm… “Geoff” appeared in last weeks Southside People, a few days later we got some wider attention with an appearance in the Evening Herald, they took our photo’s too but evidently we weren’t good looking enough to make the website! I was lucky enough to get my mug in the paper though, placed right next to the unfortunate story “Teenage girl finds burglar in bedroom”, no doubt he was going to leave something in exchange for whatever he took…

This morning Gerry gave an interview to Beat fm 102-103 and I will be having a chat with Q102‘s Scott William today (Wednesday 29th April) at 18.45 and 4FM‘s Michael Comyn on the Sunday Breakfast show. Tune in!

And we’re being blogged and tweeted all over the place so thanks Derry and keep up the good work guys, we need your help!

As for my little project of bartering my way from a money clip and to something great, well I already have something great… but I want greater! I managed to meet up with Dani in her college to make the first trade of the money clip (with dollars included!) for her Zackynthos mug. What a mug it was, the Greek tea tasted so sweet and Greek. (Greek Tea – its like Irish coffee but tea instead of coffee and Greek Ouzo instead of whiskey.)(ok, I invented it.)(it wasn’t good.)

After getting the mug i received a post from greenersean saying that he had a gas-mask to swap for the mug, a real life Soviet Cold-War gas mask! Now I could’t pass up an opportunity like that! I hopped into my car, mug in hand, and drove to the address greenersean gave me. After brief pleasantries (turns out Sean is Greek, it all makes perfect sense now!) he presented the mask, obviously I couldn’t resist trying it on. Sean was even kind enough to offer me a cup of tea (in some sort of ‘normal’ mug) but I was glad to see how happy his new mug made him, obviously terribly home-sick, bless.

So that’s the latest update, remember to tune into Q102, 4Fm… Keep on blogging and spreading the word about Swop-o-nomics and if you want to get your hands on my new gas-mask, make me an offer!

Barter for Beer

Just came across a pub offering beer in return for barter. I imagine the quality of the services they get may go down hill a little as the night progresses…

Famous Football Swops

Swopping is a lot more commonplace then we first thought. All you need to do is look at the history of the some great (and some not so great) football players of the last 20 years.  Here at Swop-o-nomics we took a look at how some footballers made their start in professional football.

Ian Wright, the legendary Arsenal striker and current Gladiators presenter was signed by Crystal Palace manager Steve Coppell in 1985 in exchange for a set of weights.

Gary Pallister, former England international and one half of the famous Manchester United mid 90’s centre half pairing started off his senior football career at Billingham Town. He was signed by Middleborough in 1984 in exchange for a set of strips.

John Barnes (Footballer and “World of Motion”-1990 Rapper!) was singed as a fresh 17 year-old by Watford F.C for a set of kit from a non-league team.

These three players all became distinguished England Internationals, it just shows what great value can be achieved by swops.

Tony Cascarino, the former Irish international, was famously signed in exchange for tracksuits and some corrugated iron when he was signed by Gillingham F.C from Crockenhill F.C in 1982.

Clubs sometimes accept pretty much anything for players…

In 2006, a Romanian club exchanged a player for 15Kg of meat.

In 2002 a Swedish player, Kenneth Kristensen, was transferred by his club for the fee of his weight in shrimp. The player even had to do a boxing style weigh-in before his debut to see how much shrimp would be required.

Just goes to show, a little imagination can go a long way…

Lenihan encouraging Barter.

It looks like the government are starting to open up to the idea of barter as a means of stimulating the economy. In the budget that came out on Tuesday 7th one particular passage stands out (to me anyway!):

Measures to help Stimulate the Economy

…

To address the overhang of unsold properties, I am proposing to establish a Stamp Duty “trade-in” scheme. This will enable a person purchasing a new house or apartment to trade-in their previous property with the seller who will not be liable to Stamp Duty until they subsequently sell the traded-in property on at a later stage. Full details of this initiative will be contained in the forthcoming Finance Bill and it is envisaged that the scheme will apply from the date of publication of the Finance Bill to 31 December 2010.

I am also changing the way in which car dealers can account for VAT on second hand cars from July next.

So, tax exemptions for bartering developers… well it’s a start! Maybe there could be more moves to promote barter down the line.

Swop-o-nomics, economic gaffer tape.

So why did we set up Swop-o-nomics? Why do we think it’s time to dust off good old barter?

We’re all sick of hearing the word ‘Recession’, it’s being thrown around a lot lately – by the Irish more than most. We all know what caused it, any group of 5 year olds can now discuss the perils of the subprime mortgage market and risky tax regimes of Lenihan and Co.

The simple explanation (so the 3 year olds can understand) is that the market broke, and we don’t know how to fix it. The law of Supply and Demand seem to have become  more of a suggestion than a law. People are hearing of job cuts > think “Geez, what if I lose my job too!” > Stop spending and start saving their money just in case > companies can’t sell their stuff > they have to lay off staff to cut costs > more people stop spending money, etc… kind of reminds me of a song

Anyway… our little scenario there was caused by a change in demand, but the change in demand was caused simply by a fear of not being able to consume in the future, so the people reduced today’s consumption. This has pretty much left people only spending money on things they can’t avoid paying for. So the whole country is sitting at home, all these extremely skilled people who trained or practiced for years are waiting for money to come in so they can consume again. That’s where we come in, to try and smooth this whole thing over.

There are accountants sitting at home looking at their broken bathrooms planning on fixing them any day now, there are plumbers who lost their jobs unsure how to best re-structure their finances.  In normal times, imagine the plumber would pay €200 for some financial advice and the accountant would then pay €200 to get the bathroom fixed. But now they just sit at home looking for money to do this zero-sum transaction… How does that make sense? Why not just skip the money bit!

Our goal in this is to help people allocate their skills as efficiently as possible, if the plumber does the plumbing and the accountant does the accounting… everybody’s better off.

Now, say you earn €30,000 per year and you spend say, €5,000 on things which you could have bartered. House painting, plumbing, financial and legal advice… anything. You now have an extra €5,000 than you would have had, and you can spend as you wish. What you have essentially done, is earned an extra €5,000 that year by doing what you’re good at in your free time. It was probably much less than €5,000 worth of free time, but your service was worth much more to the other person than your free time was to you. The net result of this is you have consumed more than you would have previously and increased the amount of goods and services traded within the economy (GDP) by €10,000 instead of €5,000.

Now, obviously this can’t be scalled up to live on barter alone, work and jobs play a very important role in gathering people who are good at a particular thing together to work together and provide the service better than each of them working separately. But as an aside from your job or if you’re unemployed, barter can help smooth the bad times and boost the good.

There is no great writing, only great rewriting*.

The oxford English dictionary defines a “blog” as… no. Once upon a time on the internet… no. To quote Barack Obama… no. To quote Britney Spears… definitely not. It all began after a particularly rough night in Vegas, I woke up in a bathtub filled with ice… NO, no, no, no, no.

This blogging thing is something I have encountered on many occasions but have never really taken the time to understand, only one way to do this, jump right in the deep end, without any inflatable toys to hold onto. I decided that because of Swop-o-nomics I am now interesting enough for people to read about what i’m up to, throughout this blog I am going to let you in on all the little secrets and goings on in the world of Swop-o-nomics, my experiences being part of this wonderful and unique website (not at all biased) and on the slow weeks I will put up any rambling thoughts that go through my head. The reason its a separate blog… Gerry didnt want me clogging up the forums!

Thus far Swop-o-nomics has been going from strength to strength, the concept and site were conceived and built within days, our friends out there on boards.ie got the ball rolling with suggestions and became some of our first members, then swaps started to happen, one relatively successful enterprise competition (2nd in our group) later and we are where we are now.

There are a few fun things going on in the forum, I am experimenting with a one red paperclip style swap here which i’m going to push as far as I can, we are also trying to decide on our brand new logo so click here to let us know what you think.

We are currently looking into getting flyers and t-shirts printed up, so I’ll keep you posted on when we’ll be out and about, if you see us on the street do come up and say hey!

The paragraphs are getting smaller so I think i’m running out of things to say right now, it’ll take a few posts to get into the swing of this blogging malarkey. Before I go I want to thank Colin Fitz for giving us a shout on his blog. Don’t forget you can keep in touch with us on Twitter, Facebook and of course Swop-o-nomics.

Till next time,

Jeff

*Justice Louis Brandeis