I personally have, though on rare occasions. I prefer to have seen and felt the actual product before deciding to purchase it. But I have also bought stuff from websites that do not have physical brick-and-mortar shops too.
Amazon is one e-business that everyone must be familiar with. It houses millions of titles on the cyberspace, which is an excellent strategy. Without the restrictions of a physical shop front, the cost of maintaining the business is drastically reduced.
Blogshops are also rampant in Singapore. Besides offering more choices for shoppers, many of their products are also sold at lower prices than physical shops. Hence, they are very popular among students in particular.
Have you set up any online businesses before? If not, do feel free to share your shopping experience too!
Many people are into online social networking these days. From the earlier Friendster (and its predescessors) to Myspace to Facebook and Twitter, everyone is sharing their thoughts and photos with each other.
I was paranoid about sharing information with other people on social networking sites. To be honest, it was only a year ago that my Facebook account was created. Immediately after its creation, I privatized it and checked many settings to ensure my privacy.
Is your Facebook (or any other social networking site) account public or private? How much personal information do you share on these sites?
I believe that while it is fun to network with other people online, security must be a top priority for Internet users. Be careful of sharing sensitive information!
Social media is a huge part of our Internet experience. Youtube is one popular platform, and is the 4th greatest search engine on the Internet. Other popular social media platforms include Tumblr and Flickr.
Social media makes our lives more interesting because we can see what's going on in other people's lives. It is also an alternative platform for learning more about a certain topic. For example, if I am interested in cooking, I may search for cooking demonstration videos on Youtube. Or if I am interested in photography, I may visit Flickr and search for inspiration there.
I suppose the Internet is no stranger to the majority of us. We were born in the infocomm technology age. We grew up with computers and handphones. We are now connected to each other 24/7. We are the internet(adapted from "wearetheweb.org").
It seems that an introduction about anything almost always have to include a history component, yeah? But I shan't go into details about it. Let's just make it optional, so here's a video about the history of the Internet for interested parties.
When we speak of the Internet, we cannot isolate it from greater issues such as the digital divide, which exists between the developed and the developing nations, as well as between more affluent and poorer citizens in each country (albeit to a much milder extent). The 80/20 rule was mentioned in class.
The 80/20 rule (also known as the Pareto principle, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) predicts that ~80% of effects result from ~20% of the causes in many events. This principle is more commonly encountered in business, but can also be applied to technology and the Internet.
The Internet is a very vast space, and there are currently no less than 11.5 billion websites existing (statistic taken from WorldWideWebSize.com, retrieved 1 September 2011). But how many of them do we visit, or even are aware of? Just a very small fraction of that number, no doubt.
This is just a brief insight to how huge the Internet is, and there will definitely be more features that we will explore in this blog. Keep on reading, folks!
