eBay watching is window on the world

Since the dawn of civilisation, marketplaces have been the locations in which all of society, from the sublime to the ridiculous, has found representation.

Take the ancient Greeks, for example. The agora, or marketplace, was the great gathering place not just for farmers, merchants and buyers but philosophers and their students, politicians, society and servants, and of course, mischief-makers and layabouts with nothing better to do on a lazy afternoon.

The same holds for Irish markets, from the village and county fairs of past centuries to Dublin's Grafton or Henry Street today.

Substitute the Platos and Aristotles with the bar-room philosophers of Keoghs or McDaids and you'd still have a similar slice of Irish society at a particular moment in time.

And thus it is with the Web. While many sites still cater primarily to the techies and the computer gamers and other people who form the more adept tier of online society, the Internet marketplaces are the places where the whole swirl of Net users tend to converge.

That's probably because if you are trying to sell something to someone, you want to make the process a simple one - so that you and I don't need computer science degrees in order to buy a book or a pair of socks or a few bottles of wine. And, of course, buying and selling are activities everyone understands.

The Web can be intimidating to newcomers and if you're looking for something familiar from the real world that translates over to the Net world, a market of some sort is an obvious starting point.

That's why e-Bay, www ebay.com, the online auction site, is such an interesting site to keep an eye on. Again and again, it has served as a kind of microcosm of the Net world. It offers up a curious cross-section of the people who increasingly inhabit that world - and that means the ordinary crowd who haven't a clue about things like megahertz and baud rates and shouldn't need to as the Web becomes increasingly mainstream.

More pointedly, e-Bay also repeatedly has served as a lightening rod for both accomplishment and controversy, highlighting just about every pungent Net issue going. That's precisely because it brings together such a swathe of realworld, real-life users in one big rollicking mass.

Here are some of the ways in which e-Bay has personified many of the achievements and dilemmas of the Internet. To begin with, it underlines the lucrative possibilities of e-commerce (in a way that the better-known but continuously unprofitable Amazon.com doesn't) because it is one of the few redhot Net commerce sites that is in the black. It also had a stellar initial public offering and its shares have remained high, making it a recognised bell-wether Net stock.

The site demonstrates the ways in which real people can use the Net profitably, too - pretty much anyone can sell anything from beanie babies to furniture to sports memorabilia to van Gogh paintings on e-Bay (and all have been on the block there). In general, people love the site.

On the other hand, the very fact that anyone can buy and sell has raised questions about how one judges the reliability and honesty of a buyer or seller. The site has also come under scrutiny for the kinds of merchandise it sells - recently it had to change its policies to block gun sellers from flogging firearms online, without conducting the background checks on buyers which federal and some state laws require in the US.

Privacy concerns have arisen over how personal information is handled. The technological liability of a site for loss of service when equipment fails has also been an issue (e-Bay was down pretty much all day Monday due to server problems).

Two other e-Bay occurrences in the past two weeks also served to remind anyone who likes watching the ups and downs and ins and outs of the Net of how sublimely ridiculous, and ridiculously sublime, the medium can be.

First, a 13-year-old US teenager made a number of bids totalling a heady $3.1 million (€2.92 million) for items on the site, including offers for a red Corvette sports-car, a van Gogh painting, a medical office in Florida and (bizarrely) a $900,000 bid for an antique iron bed which belonged to a former Canadian prime minister.

Five of his 14 bids were accepted - emphasising the problems that online sites have in ascertaining who and what someone is.

The boy was supposed to be 18 to be making bids on the site, and clearly, no one checked his credit.

Then, a group of 16 managers and engineers who have been working together at a California Internet service provider decided to auction themselves on e-Bay, with bids starting at $3.14 million for the group. Dissatisfied with their current workplace but happy about their esprit de corps, they wanted new jobs, but as a team. The highest bidder will own them all on May 8th. E-Bay's commission? $39,260.

Yep, you can't beat e-Bay if you want the kind of entertaining and intriguing marketplace experience that makes people-watching in a town square so endlessly interesting.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie