Shopping locally means looking at local ads

Rural areas like most of the Florida panhandle, and well, much of the U.S., cannot fully utilize the Internet's ability to marry a buyer and seller in a satisfactory sale.
As an example, say you want to buy a coffee table. If you go to craigslist.com, the newspaper industry's nemesis, and click "Florida," you get a handful of options, most of which are in south Florida. To get close to home you have to click "Pensacola/Panhandle."
You then do a search for "coffee table," and you're heartened to see there are 153 returns. However, look where they are. Most are in Pensacola. A few are in Niceville or Fort Walton Beach and two in Destin.
With gasoline at $4 a gallon, not many people are going to drive the double digit miles into Destin or Niceville to look at a coffee table, much less buy it sight unseen.
When you want to buy or sell something, you want to buy it here, unless you can save some really big dollars by going elsewhere.
Have you ever tried to shop for a car on the Internet?
Even if you are lucky enough to find the Web site of a local dealer, many won't give you a price for a new or used vehicle. You still have to call and then go see them to negotiate a deal.
You look in your local paper for the good deals.
The Internet is good for so many things. It is good for researching what kind of car you want to buy or picking colors for your new living room or finding rare and hard-to-find items, but in order to buy an everyday something, to do some really hardcore shopping, you still turn to your local newspaper, TV or radio station for the latest specials.
The information on the Internet is so unorganized and hard to pin down that it has rendered it all but useless. Type in "yard sales in Santa Rosa Beach Fl" and you will get more than 2 million listings.
Type in "tires for sale in Santa Rosa Beach Fl," and you get more than 200,000 listings.
Who has time to wade through all this?
One person's trash is another's treasure. Why else would there be two resale stores within a mile of one another on U.S. 98? But finding your treasure can be difficult if you have to do a door-to-door search.
Looking in last week's Walton Sun, there was not a single ad for a coffee table.
In the Northwest Florida Daily News, well,   who can tell? Most people are not going to sift through all those ads for computers, wedding dresses, lawn mowers and bedroom suites, hoping to spot something as nonessential as a coffee table.
What we need is our own swap system.
It is a problem we recognize here at The Sun and are working on but would like your input.
Do you think a free swap-and-shop is something you would use?
Advertisers, is it something you would help support in an electronic form?
How can we best give you the information you want when you want it?
E-mail us at thewaltonsun@gmail.com and tell us what you think.