Exchange sites are popping up everyday. Sites that bring together people who are willing to trade favors, items, services, etc., for a wide variety of things, limited only by immagination. These sites work with the concept of trading, not selling. Just like in the origins of economics, when people exchanged a pig for a sack of rice and such.

One of the first sites of this kind I ever saw was one of the GMail exchange sites: people with GMail accounts (willing to offer their available invites) and those who can offer something in return are put together. Those interested in getting an invite post what they can offer: a favour, website promotion, a postcard, there are even people, as I´ve seen yesterday, offering to financially adopt a hippopotamus from a local zoo.

Although people don´t actually benefit financially from such trades, I question the legal aspects of these “transactions”, but hey, it seems like people are happy with this and these sites are up and running, so maybe Google doesn´t care…

Today, however, I came across a really nice exchange site: BlogBarter, where the offerings are basically “help with your blog” – from design to domain and programming assistance. I thought this was cool because there are many people out there with plenty of things to say and willing to express themselves, but without the creative and technological skills to make something that will stand out from the crowd and, let´s face it: using a default Blogger template is a little frustrating, however nice they may be. I for one hate using premade templates and I feel that your blog design is part of the experiece, as an extention of self-expression – how your blog looks can reflect a lot about your personality, the look and feel affects the reader´s experiece and a bad design, with poor contrast and readability, wide paragraphs using fonts that are too small, can actually discourage the reader to dig into the content to the point that they just move on without giving your texts a chance. So, maybe you can´t design, but still you want a nice looking blog. Or maybe you can design but can´t code. And that´s where BlogBarter becomes handy. I think that was a great idea. Everyone has something to offer, right? So go, swap ahead and let me know of other swap sites that you know of. :-)

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