Well, looks like just after I left for my little vacation, a major news article came out in the Globe & Mail (one of my most respected Canadian newspapers) entitled: "Fast Cash Just a Click Away", authored by David Andreatta.

The article seems to be rather short of any new details for those that are already familiar with Prosper, and especially for those that have already been reading the grassroots info out there (such as the bloggers). The article goes over a few case examples from Prosper users in the US, some interesting statistics (74% of Britons would go to Zopa instead of a bank for a loan), and of course, a little background on CommunityLend, such as its co-founders, Michael Garrity and Colin Henderson.

It is a good read and it is very good to see a nationwide newspaper picking up coverage. Even a search on Google News or Yahoo News for CommunityLend returns this Globe article as the only result. It is truly nice to see the Globe & Mail on the forefront here, I like them a lot :).

Hopefully this will have an echoboom effect onto other media players, especially the non-print kind. I have the feeling that a TV news story will hit the idea far further than a newspaper article would for this type of product.

But there are other reasons for this being very good news: one of the most major things that a successful market needs is "Liquidity". And with more and more people knowing about the service, and more and more users, liquidity increases. Lots of Liquidity helps to minimize short-term distortions in the market, such as short periods of very high or very low interest rates. This is similar to how eBay categories with small numbers of items will have drastically different final prices, but for more volumous categories, prices are rather constant (for the same goods).

Even speaking with many of my seemingly very financially-literate US relatives have never heard of Prosper, so whether there would be enough liquidity in a Canadian microlending market is a concern of mine.