I hate to shop but I love to eBay - and the bargains are the least of it. Trading on eBay is like living in a medieval village in cyberspace: a place where the cash is cold but the hearts are warm, where every transaction has its story. For eBay, arguably the world's most successful dotcom, is so much more than a global auction site. It is a place where 114 million people go to buy things - but also where they go to chat and bicker and gossip and gripe, and generally enjoy the camaraderie of the marketplace. Most of all, like the internet itself, eBay is a paradox: a world where anonymity fosters fellowship and machines make us all human again. eBay gives us back our past. It helps us recover an older, more personal relationship with commerce.

Meg Whitman, eBay's folksy chief executive, says the success of her auction site proves that people are "basically good". It may be too soon to declare the triumph of human virtue, but when millions of strangers agree to trade with millions of other strangers across the globe, every single day, it must prove something about the human condition.