Web 2.0 Asia

Channy Yun, a Korean web veteran at Daum, recently discovered he has a 100 Active X's installed on his PC.


Well, if a wary web expert has 100 Active X's installed, guess how many average users would have.

Many Korean web sites, ranging from internet banking sites to TV livecasting sites, mandate users to install Active X components (a small bit of extension program used by Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser) to use the service. Which means if you are a Firefox user in Korea, there are many websites that are quite integral to your life that you simply can't use.

For example, you cannot print public documents by accessing government websites on Firefox. Or, for that matter, you cannot even buy a Mac on a Mac - as the credit card transaction requires the installation of a security program that only exists as an Active X control for Internet Explorer. Want to buy a Mac from their online store? Get a PC.

As a Mac/Firefox user, I suffer from this every day - one (good) side effect is that I tend to buy less stuff on the internet. That is except for when I IM my wife to buy something for me using our Toshiba PC at home.

Naver, Korea's top portal and the world's #5 search service, announced plans to let its users edit Naver's news main page.

The new project, dubbed "Open Cast", will allow logged-in users to customize Naver's news page by picking and choosing the user's favorite sources of news - be it personal blogs, traditional newspapers, or small online news sites.

So it's like a user customizable Yahoo! Buzz, or a user customizable Apple iTunes podcast directory - if there existed such things.

It's Naver's effort to fend off the conspiracy theory that the portal is manipulating the public opinion through editorial control over its main page, which is visited by some tens of millions of web users every day.

Well, if you are a portal site, you can't avoid having at least some level of editorial power, as there's only so much space on the portal's homepage where the most popular news can be displayed, and at the end of the day someone has to choose what news will appear there.

But there have been suspicions that Naver tried to balance the netizens' opinions with those of the government. Recently, for example, Naver was found to have blocked a search keyword "Afreeca", an online video company that became hugely popular after livecasting anti-government candlight protests. Naver said it was a simple mistake.

Anyway, Open Cast is Naver's answer to such suspicisions - it's like saying "if you don't like us to pick the front page news, then why don't you do it yourself?"

As mentioned on a previous post, Agora, Korean portal site Daum's web forum service, has been on fire during the recent (ongoing, actually) anti-beef-import candlelight protests.

It turned out that (link in Korean) the top 3.3% of the users contributed for nearly half of the whole posts; top 10% accounted for 71% of the entire postings.

This is a (rather dramatic) case that shows there are so few content creators (as opposed to content consumers) on the web. So forget about 20/80 rule - it's more like 10/70, or even 3/50.

Oh, by the way, this is crazy: The top 10 users logged whopping 21,180 posts during the last two months or so, averaging nearly 30 posts per day/person. Remember we're talking about long articles, sometimes really really long. And most articles are well-written, as the authors are well aware of how much of hateful comments they will get if they do a crappy post.

Of course these folks are not paid for their work or anything like that. Hey, Techcrunch writers - did you guys just whine "too many posts, too little time"? ;)

Yesterday I spoke at Business Blog Summit (link in Korean) - I talked about the new blog service we've launched recently in Korea, which I'll spare on this blog.

As the name suggests, Business Blog Summit is mainly about how companies and organizations can leverage blog and other types of social media. Most of the audience were young marketing folks, who I assume are often told by their bosses to "go learn about this blogging thing".

Here's some stuff from the conference that I think would be interesting to those outside of Korea as well:

Kia's manager, Mr Ryu, talked about the car company's corporate blog called Kia Buzz (about which I wrote here). Kia studied the lifestyle of average car buyers and figured it's meaningless to focus their marketing efforts only on the old media. Hence the needs of a global blog, but Ryu said running a corporate blog turned out to be so challenging that Kia thought about quitting it altogether many times.

They realized the best content they could offer was actually the real-life stories from actual car designers and engineers. But the challenge was finding contributors without explicit benefit (except for some free dinners :-). Also, many of the behind-the-scene folks at Kia were Koreans, so they also had the language issue as well.

But after months of effort, Kia Buzz contributed significantly to the increased brand awareness - and also could send out more "human" voice, such as Kia Azerbaijan sponsoring the national arm-wrestling competition (which wouldn't have been known outside of Azerbaijan if it wasn't for this Kia Buzz blog).


Also interesting was a "hospital blog" run by Kim's eye hospital. This is no average mom and pop clinic by the way - it's the biggest eye hospital in Asia with 40+ surgeons and 400K+ outpatients. Dr. Kim from the hospital said he felt  hospitals had to provide more objective medical information, as today such an overwhelming part of the messages coming from hospitals are of promotional nature. (Try "LASIK" on Naver search.)

So Kim's Eye hospital started a blog where they put up medical information (not in a promotional voice) and real-life stories happening at their hospital (which should be quite interesting - that's why medical dramas like ER have been so popular on TV). As the first "hospital blog", the site drew lots of media attention - a first mover advantage.

Also, I didn't know until this conference that City of Seoul runs a blog! City of Seoul has been blogging since March 2004, and blogging is an important initiative for the city as it aims to attract 12M+ tourists this year. These days, tourists find information mostly from blogs - so the city is planning to do Chinese and English blogging on the likes of QQ and Myspace. (It's pretty interesting they mentioned QQ first - surely Seoul wants to attract many tourists from China.)

Venturebeat's Eric Eldon reports "Friendster’s growth in Asia could make it the top social network in the world, once again." The article quotes Friendster's claim that they are the number one social network service in Asia, leading everyone (Facebook, Myspace, Mixi, Cyworld) by a big margin.


Wait a minue.. Friendster number one in Asia? Every day, I'm getting emails from Facebook and LinkedIn about a new friend request or new updates from my friends. But I haven't had a single email from Friendster for a long time. So at least for me, Friendster doesn't feel like a very active service - But then I may not be profiled as an "average" internet user in Asia.

Stats like these bring a question to my mind: Will the Western/US social network services (Myspace, FB, Friendster) take over the Asian market eventually? Or, will one of the local players (Mixi, Cyworld, 51.com) come out as the Asia's social network winner, transforming itself into a regional market leader that can compete neck-and-neck with Myspace and FB in the global market? Or will every single Asian market have its own social network of choice, without going the consolidation route? What do you think?

OECD Ministerial Meeting is being held in Seoul, Korea, on 17-18 June 2008. As the theme of the meeting for this meeting is "The Future of the Internet Economy", I was honored to be asked to contribute a piece on emerging web technology.

The following is my article - a pretty high-level overview on Naver's domination in the Korean market and the pressure on the company to embrace the open internet further. I tried to be as objective as possible - Trust me, I'm not a blind-folded Naver basher. It's a rather long article (2 1/2 pages long) but it will be a good food for thought, even for those outside of the Korean web industry. For better viewing, click on the top rightmost button (fullscreen mode).

On June 13, I was at the OpenSocial Conference '08. Here's my coverage:

The 450-capacity auditorium was packed – showing the high interest in open platform technologies. First up was the keynote by Chul-soo Ahn, the president of Ahnlab and a professor at KAIST teaching entrepreneurship. His keynote was about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and in Korea - a rather classic topic, but more relevant as Ahn has just come back from the Valley after being there for years. He asserted that Korean entrepreneurs and startup employees should be more focused rather than being "generalists"; also that Korean venture capital should not be a mere "money-loaning bank".

Next, Hyunsoo Hwang, a manager at Cyworld gave a talk about Cyworld and the open internet. Interesting he should say about Cyworld and the open internet as the service is widely regarded as a rather closed service... Anyways, he said Cyworld is trying to implement open data interchange with third parties - For example, if you write a book review on Cyworld's minihompy, the same review might one day also appear on the online bookstore's website.

What I found interesting was Hwang's talk on the social network monetization. Hwang said that the reason why contextual ads work very well on internet search is because the service knows the user's intention. So that means if there's a way social networks can also capture people's intention right (which should be very challenging), then he doesn't see why contextual ads on social networks should not work well too.

It is well known that Cyworld is actually one of only few social network services around the world that generate enough profit, by selling digital items such as background music or avatars. It's interesting that Cyworld seems to be focusing on improving search experience these days - Has Cyworld's digital items revenue hit the wall or something? Is Cyworld interested in generating search-related revenues, such as contextual ads? I don't know..

Traditionally, Cyworld's hottest service has been photo album. But lately, Cyworld diary, a short-form blog of sort, has picked up significant usage. Probably the same reason why Twitter has been popular - people are busier, and they want quick and easy writing over putting up pics.

It turns out that 60% of Cyworld visits occur among 1-chon (i.e. friends) while 40% among non-friends. These statistics from one of the major social networks of the world verifies that social networks are mostly for strengthening the relationships among those who already know each other.

In another session, Kyosuk Song Andy Kyoseok Song at Ahnlab introduced IDtail, the first Korean service (and the fourth in the world) that fully implemented open social. I've heard unofficially quite a few times that this service is one of the best practices (if not the best) of open social technologies.

IDTail is basically a Linkedin-like service an OpenSocial-based social network service. It's an open social container into which various open social apps can be plugged. Song said that after rolling out open social apps, IDtail's unique visitors increased by 250%.

In the following session, Sangsuk Lee of 3Cim Korea shared some "inside stories" related to open social. This interesting Korean startup is based in Silicon Valley and in Korea, and runs a photo widget service called MagToo and MagShow.

After developing application based in open social, they say that opensocial's promise of “Write once, run everywhere” should be taken with a grain of salt – different service providers have different specs, and for their own case, they could launch only on Myspace despite working for over 4 months on Opensocial. But they say Open Social certainly cuts down the development time.

Their application, Magshow, shows well what an OpenSocial application can do;  Magshow allows Facebook or other social network users to display all their friends' pictures in one place (such as under profile) without having to visit each one's page.

WISIA is another service from IWIlab, a US- and Korea-based web startup founded by Brian Kim, the former CEO of NHN USA. Again NHN is the company operating Naver, Korea's top internet portal.

I introduced an English based service called Buru.com on this blog before - Apparently Buru is not the only service rolled out by IWIlab. Unlike Buru, Wisia is offered only in Korean for the time being.


Wisia is basically a social recommendation service. It's like a Q&A service (such as Naver's knowledge search or Yahoo Answers) focusing entirely on recommendations. A user can either put up a new question, or search through questions already posted by others seeking for good recommendations. Questions include "Where are the best spots I can take family during the holidays?" or "What do twenty-somethings have to have, in order to become happier?"

Click on one of these questions, and if there are enough answers (that is, the recommendations) posted already, the user goes directly to the voting page. For example, when I click on the question "Where are the best spots I can take family during the holidays?", I am directed to the poll, where I'm supposed to pick my favorite first. Here I'm choosing "Sullak Waterpia".


Then I can see the poll result, i.e. where my selection is ranked at. Here I can see Sullak Waterpia is ranked at the second place (second most voted option for the family vacation place), and see my selection was also supported by other folks.



If I don't think a given recommendation is not ranked high enough, I can click to vote it. Or if I believe there are other good items that are not yet listed, I can scroll down and click on the "Add item" option. I am adding "Jirisan" as a new item of a good spot to take my family.


Adding an item can be done in a brisk. Wisia provides built-in Google image search (via mashup, I suppose), so I can choose the right image to go with the item and write a short message as to why I recommend this item. Placing the Google image search upfront is Wikia's way of encouraging users to insert the accompanying images to go with their posts. Wisia knows very well that pictures say a thousand words. As a result, most recommendations that appear on Wisia seem to have images.


At least in Korea, knowledge search was what catapulted Naver into its current leading position (which I'll discuss in further detail in my next piece.) Wisia, when done right, can be a better alternative to Naver's knowledge search for those specifically seeking for recommendations. Other services also to note include 43 things, 43 places, and Should do this.

Joop Dorresteijn over at the Next Web wrote a piece on Korean web, for which I contributed via email interviews:

Today, South Korea is the most connected country on earth, but the funny thing is that we hardly hear anything about Korea’s web scene. This made us curious about what websites are popular over there, and if Korea has a web 2.0 scene. To find that out, we reviewed the three visited websites in Korea and we interviewed Chang W. Kim, Korean web 2.0 enthusiast and initiator of the Open Web Asia ‘08 conference.

... Chang has written before about why so little South Korean companies get ‘Techcrunched‘. He thinks that it’s related to the lack of efforts to bring the Asian Web 2.0 innovations to the attention of the rest of the world. “Less effort to get these companies known, less attention to Asian Web 2.0 industry, less venture money flowing in, less number of startups, and so on.”

Which is why we are making such initiatives as the Open Web Asia workgroup (initiated by Gang Lu at Mobinode) and the Open Web Asia '08 conference (for which an update post is long overdue - check back here next week.)

The whole Korean society is literally in frenzy now. Just look at this picture. We have protests like these every single day in Seoul.


So what happened? Here's my one paragraph summary for you: The new Korean president Mr Lee hastily signed the US beef import agreement, without paying close attention to banning the kind of beef that might potentially cause mad cow disease. Fitting his nickname "bulldozer", Lee tried to push through his plan despite serious concerns. Amid this, the traditional media tried to play a cover-up game, accusing the public health concerns as unfounded rumors and the protesters as left-wing manipulators.

But the majority of protesters were not political minds - they were average Koreans who were deeply upset by the government and the old media. Given that many Koreans are web-savvy, always-connected, blogging-like-crazy folks, what we had was essentially millions of angry bloggers.

Ouch. You don't really want to imagine what happens when you have millions of angry bloggers.

Behind the massive physical protests, there are even more massive web activities: Protests are organized by mobile messages and broadcast on the internet live at the scene. But the government and traditional media embarrass themselves on a daily basis by not "getting it". The government once mistook Daum's Agora, the massively popular internet discussion forum, as some kind of secret political party. (Duh?)

It used to be so easy - the government could just set up a plan, push through it, let the media do its part. But the web 2.0 turned nearly every single Korean into a media figure. Now everyone ventilates his or her ideas on the internet, to which all others are responding back and forth - the amount of communication taking place grows exponentially. It ain't simple and easy anymore. If you want to lead people, you should do it in a 2.0 way, or you're doomed.

This is what Korean politicians and old media folks are slowly realizing (if they ever are, that is), in a very painful and costly way. Politicians around the world can learn some important lessons from what's happening in Korea - Are you there, Barack Obama?

PS. There's a deeper analysis on this matter on Taewoo's Technokimchi.