Auction @ Internet

Have you ever bought things from Yahoo auction or Taobao?

Nowadays, online auction being more and more prevalent in Hong Kong. Various auction websites like Yahoo, Taobao and ebay have become the paradises of many shopaholic. 

In fact, online shopping is really a suitable and convenient shopping way for those lazy people like me. Because I can browse all the products I intend to buy at home without going out. Another advantage of online shopping is that you can know the prices of the products of each shop clearly and there is no need to go around to compare the prices. Besides, I can do online shopping anytime as the online shops open for 24 hours.

However, the main drawback of online shopping is the time consuming delivery process of the products. Therefore, online shopping can never replace "real" shopping since the customers cannot get the products immediately. If the seller are not in Hong Kong, you may even have to wait for a longer time for the product to send to you. Of course, you can also choose face trade if this service is available to shorten the delivery process.

In addition to buying things, you can sell the things which are unuseful for you throught the acution system online simply by just uploading the photos of that thing and set the price you desired.

By the way, the most important problem of using the online auction system that we concern a lot is probably the You have to bare the risk that you cannot receive the products or the quality of the product is poor.

Since more and more people like using Facebook to communicate and socialize with other now, Facebook also becomes one of the most popular online shopping platforms gradually. Some people may make their Faceboook into an online shop and upload the photos of the products on their album. I think creating an online shop in Facebook may gain greater promotional effect than that in other websites as the Facebook users can post comments or Arrprove 'o the items they like immediately. And after their friends view the status of those shoppers in Facebook, they may visit the shop as well. This can undoubtedly increase the popularity of the shop.

In view of this, some of my friends asked me to open an online shop on Yahoo or Facebook. They thought that operating online shop can not only save the time of monitoring the real shop, but also save the rental cost. In such case, the online shop owners can gain more profit by selling the products at the same price as the real shop. However, operating an online shop is still a great challenge for me as the online shop owners have to manage all the things themselves including ordering and transferring the product, taking photos of them and uploading to the Internet, contacting the buyers and sendng out the products.

Maybe, I will consider and start my online business soon. But now, I want to be a buyer rather than a seller!

Era of New Media ...

The rapid development of media and technology over the past decades has marked the world’s entering to the new era of media. Nowadays, technology is undoubtedly an impartible part of our daily life. Entering the MTR train, you may find that over 50% of people playing with their iPhone or iPad. Most of us even spend much time on using computers and online communities every day.

Facebook, one of most well-known on-line communities in the world, for example, has nearly 4, 00000000 users. Apart from Facebook, online social spaces such as Twitter, Xanga and MSN which provide Internet users with a convenient channel to communicate with their friends and other Internet users, have become more and more prevalent among Hong Kong people, especially youngsters. As people spend more time on online communication by using these virtual tools, the chance of face to face interactions has inevitably decreased in our society.

Participating in online communities allow us to learn communication pattern and discourse system within these sites, which can further help us to communicate with others and integrate into these online communities better. I also think the practices of different online communities are not exactly the same even though they belong to the same kind of media.

What I expect to learn from this course is not only communicating and chatting with others through bloggering, but also to dig out the linguistic features, culture and social practices of "blogger" and other media. Later, I will share what I have learnt, as well as useful or interesting things related to this course here. Finally, I hope I can enjoy the course with all of you in this semester. Let's start our digital media life!!!=]