Exercise1-1A

1A. What is meant by an online community? How is it important for e-commerce?

An online community is a group of people who want to gather together around a shared purpose, activity and interest; they are brought together by the chance of shared community feeling with others who share their world views via internet.
Refer to YAHOO's website, there are a number of different technical environments that are used for virtual communication platform that are formed for instance News-groups, Forums, BLOG, E-mail etc. Moreover, an online community is a group of people who need join to meet a need, for example social, information, and learning. Refer to ZOPE's website, there are a lots of technical knowledge articles, resources and documents sharing for the professional developers and web masters.

Before accessing the online community for accessing private resources or member services, users usually need to join in their membership. During registration, users need to fill in their personal information, for example, name, email address, sex, age, etc. Based on those personal information, YAHOO and ZOPE would send their recently promotions, services, new products and web news to their members by email for advertisement purpose.
As a result, a kindly virtual advertising channel is formed, which let their business rapidly grow as more people know their products.
The successful examples are such as YAHOO and ZOPE.