Group Assignment: Post # 1

This week we looked at several Internet Marketing methods. Together with your groupmates, find a specific example of how a company is using each method below:
1. Blog
2. Interactive advertisement
3. Search engine
4. Online partnerships or affiliate marketing
5. RSS feeds
6. Social networking
7. Gadgets
By the way, the examples you find do not all have to come from the same company. In your group blog, list all the examples you find, together with links to each example. Also provide a description of the effectiveness of each example.


1. Blog
Further to our group discussion, Blog can provide business opportunities for the beginners which interest in the sales. They can through Blog to spread their business which isn’t need to pay any money; introduction the business and company background to the new client; the client can write some good comments in your blog to let everyone which is the first time to visit your blog to have a good impression. The example of it is http://hk.myblog.yahoo.com/monday868

2. Interactive Advertisment
Elements (www.elementshk.com/) is one of the most interesting website we had seen before. After you entered the website, you will see there had some mini games for you to play and guide you walking around the shopping mall on internet. You will see the power of the interactive advertisment. The mini games keep enhance interest in browsing the shopping mall. It make you know more about the shopping mall such as shops, restaurant, cinema, etc.

3. Search Engine
Open Rice (http://www.openrice.com/restaurant/index.htm) is our first selection to on behalf of the search engine. Open Rice can search the different kind of restaurant and comment in HK, through this search engine we can know that restaurant is good taste and good services or not. So when I go outside for dinner with my friend I must go to search about it.

4. Online partnerships or affiliate marketing
http://www.ebay.com.hk/ Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. And we found that ebay and paypal had a relationship with there business. You can saw a paypal logo on ebay wedsite. The PayPal is the safer, easier way to pay and get paid online. The service allows anyone to pay in any way they prefer, including through credit cards, bank accounts, buyer credit or account balances, without sharing financial information. For the advantage of paypal, it attract a lot of people to shopping on ebay that which is concern the security of paying money through internet.

5. Rss feeds
http://www.apple.com/rss/
RSS (abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. When you subscribe to Apple's feeds, you can get the updated product news from the rss.


6. Social networking
Douban.com http://www.douban.com/
Douban.com , established on March 26, 2005, is a Chinese Web 2.0 website providing social network service and online database for movies, books, and music. In 2008, it has about 1.2 million registered uses, and ranks the 74th most popular website in China according to Alexa Internet.

Douban allows users to rate movies, books, and music. Its user-generated top books are cited by some leading Chinese news media such as Beijing Youth Daily
The site are provide a platform to give the register to share the film, music, book what they want to see, seeing recently, and give the comment for it
Ryan’s reference http://www.douban.com/people/ryanleung/

7. Gadgets
Google Desktop is desktop search software made by Google for Mac OS X, Linux, and Microsoft Windows. The program allows text searches of a user's e-mails, computer files, music, photos, chats, Web pages viewed, and other "Google Gadgets."
After initially installing Google Desktop, the software completes an indexing of all the files in the computer. And after the initial indexing is completed, the software continues to index files as needed. Users can start searching for files immediately after installing the program. After performing searches, results can also be returned in an Internet browser on the Google Desktop Home Page much like the results for Google Web searches.
Google Desktop can index several different types of data, including email, web browsing history from Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, office documents in the OpenDocument and Microsoft Office formats, instant messenger transcripts from AOL, Google, MSN, Skype, Tencent QQ, and several multimedia file types. Additional file types can be indexed through the use of plug-ins. Google Desktop allows the user to control which types of data are indexed by the program.
One unfortunate aspect for users with large hard drives: Google Desktop only indexes 100,000 files per drive during the initial indexing period. If you have more than 100,000 files in a particular drive, Google Desktop won't index all of them during this initial period. However, Google Desktop adds files to your index during real-time indexing when you move or open them.










A prominent feature of Google Desktop is the Sidebar, which holds several common Gadgets and resides off to one side of the desktop. The Sidebar is available with the Microsoft Windows version of Google Desktop only. The Sidebar comes pre-installed with the following gadgets:

Email - a panel which lets one view one's Gmail messages.
Scratch Pad - here one can store random notes; they are saved automatically
Photos - displays a slideshow of photos from the "My Pictures" folder (address can be changed)
News - shows the latest headlines from Google News, and how long ago they were written. The News panel is personalized depending on the type of news you read.
Weather - shows the current weather for a location specified by the user.
Web Clips - shows recent posts from RSS news feeds.
Google Talk - If Google Talk is installed, double clicking the window title will dock it to one's sidebar.