Tuesday, November 9, 2010

About My Term Research Paper

First off let me start off by saying how good it feels to finally finish this paper on eBay.

I did my research by first starting with the scholarly research aspect with http://scholar.google.com/.  Next I used google to find some articles to back up a few of my claims like how eBay is looking into implementing web 2.0 so the community can stay connected to eBay all the time.  When it came to looking for news articles I used the schools database "LexisNexis" although I felt the results that were generated wasn't that helpful. (maybe my search terms weren't as effective as I thought.)

Something I found in my research is how eBay may change the way people shop.  With ease and convenience traditional retailers must adapt or close their doors.  Something surprising I learned while doing this paper is the niche markets within eBay.  People sold things like old magazines to supplement their incomes.  And in some cases those sales generated a nice cushion.

I choose this topic because I'm a frequent user of eBay so I was thinking why not.  I would be nice to know more about a company I take for granted.  Then again they use me as well to general revenue so... I guess we can call it even.  Also in my other CIS class we were talking about whether the Internet helped form communities so I thought I could use some information from there as well in my paper.

My major finding and conclusion was that a majority of people I polled said eBay was a community.  Due to the fact that they do more than just provide a service (please refer to my paper for a more detailed explanation).

In my opinion my paper relates to new media in that it shows the growth of old media.  In my case we have traditional brick and mortar store (don't really think it's old media) to e-tailers (old media) to newer versions of e-tailing like eBay (new media).  I feel eBay is new media because it's internet based technologies that covers 4 of the 5 C's.  Communication, collaboration, convergence and finally community.

1 comment:

  1. you should go to watch "the social network" after your paper and relax a little bit.

    ReplyDelete