Pressure -> Creativity -> Cooperation

A 777-point drop.

No credit, no jobs, no production, tight spending and a dead stock market.

That's pressure. These changing factors in our environment will force us to invent solutions. And they will force us to work together in ways that will seem unfamiliar.

Since we're all becoming experts on a wide range of economic issues, lets start thinking about how we can use the web as a bootstrap out of this situation.

The ability of people to cooperate is endless, but there few online tools that take advantage of:

1) Collective knowledge (A.K.A Crowd-Sourcing)
2) Collective action
3) Collective financing

Take one of the most successful examples of 1 & 2: eBay. Only 1.3 million people worldwide make a living from eBay! That's 0.43% of the US population ... and 0.02% of the world population ...

So, while eBay's success may provide clues to the web's potential, it is clearly not enough.

The clue is cooperation.

EBay's lesson is simple: people make decisions on eBay using induction, based on collective experience.

We've been a little distracted by Web 2.0, finding ways to entertain each other. This is useful collective experience, but now we have to get down to the business of helping people to save each other.