What a week. The financial world experienced an historical meltdown, one presidential candidate claimed the economy’s “fundamentals are sound,” and the anti-regulation Republican White House embarked on the biggest government bail-out of financial firms in US history. And it ain’t over yet.

If we needed any more evidence that our much vaunted US financial system is beyond troubled, the past week (and the last several months) have make it painfully clear. First Bear Stearns went belly up, then Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11, and now AIG survives only through a massive government takeover. That does not even include the demise and/or fire sale buyouts of a slew of mortgage banks such as Countrywide, IndyMac, etc., etc.

Looks like the pillars of Wall Street turned out to be made of sand. Even the US Government’s so called financial regulators couldn’t stop the tsunami that started with the subprime woes, picked up steam because of the steep declines in housing values, and ultimately swamped the entire financial system.

It’s no wonder individual investors feel adrift. The once trusted concept of “institutional advice” now seems more like that other classic oxymoron: ”military intelligence.”

These are all more reasons why investors are increasingly shunning the institutional “experts” and doing it for themselves. The independent investing revolution started with the deregulation of brokerage firms in the ’70s, which created the first discount brokerage firms. This “democratization” movement really accelerated with the launch of the online brokerage firms in the mid to late ’90s.

I had the privilege of being a part of that online brokerage revolution when I worked at E*TRADE, one of the true pioneers of e-finance. Now, several of my colleagues from that groundbreaking company have started an innovative new web investing entity — Inner8 — that takes the E*TRADE financial revolution several critical steps further. Just as E*TRADE revolutionized brokerage by putting the actual stock trade online (and charging a lot less for it), Inner8 is revolutionizing what is arguably the more important part of the equation: advice. Now, that is truly a brilliant idea!

(Full disclosure: Inner8 is a client of my firm THUNDER FACTORY. However, even if they were not, I would still write enthusiastically about them because it really is a great new solution for independent investors looking for a lifeline these days.)

Advice has been the remaining “Black Box” that the Wall Street institutions and other financial “experts” have jealously guarded with their lives. Even as the transactional “Black Box” was blown up by the likes of E*TRADE, Ameritrade and Schwab, the even more important advice “lever” remained firmly in the hands of the high priced financial brokers and advisors. Not exactly a democracy, that.

Those days are finally coming to an end with Inner8’s social investing revolution, now brewing at www.Inner8.com.  Inner8 is tapping the immense power of the social web (communities of smart investors who heretofore tended to keep their successful investing ideas and strategies to themselves) to open up the advice equation and level the playing field for independent investors…just like you and me.

Inner8’s big idea is to bring these expert investors together, and then enable the rest of us to benefit from their winning ideas in an easy to use (and frankly, fun) online investing community. Inner8 also offers powerful analytics technology (based on a unique correlation engine), as well as easy to use tools and timely information, that help regular investors find a winning hand in a challenging financial environment. Given the fear and loathing infecting today’s financial markets, who doesn’t need that?

Even better, the basic Inner8 site is free. So, you get the ideas from expert investors on the site, the analytics technology, easy to use tools and real-time information, all free of charge. As I am sure you know, that kind of personalized advice usually does not come free (unless you count your brother-in-law’s stock tips, which are not exactly the basis for a sound investing strategy).

In the near future, Inner8 plans to roll out advanced tools for more sophisticated investors based on a monthly subscription fee (which, I am told, will still be very affordable compared to what a broker or advisor charges for advice). But, in the revolutionary, democratizing spirit of the former E*TRADErs who launched Inner8, they always plan to keep the general site free for members.

Inner8 is currently in Beta. it will launch to the public in a few weeks, but readers of this blog can use this code — 3avnr — to try out the site today. Just go to www.Inner8.com and enter the code and you are off and running.

The web has changed a lot of things, especially in the socially-driven web 2.0 era. In this frankly scary moment in history, when we can no longer trust the big financial institutions with guiding our investments (or even staying in business!), it is exciting to see some investing revolutionaries like the Inner8 team demonstrate yet again that we really do hold the power ourselves to control our own financial destinies. The new Inner8 site helps make that a reality worth discovering.

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