Web 2.0 Asia

W3C Mobile Wednesday Workshop was held last week in Seoul - the first major W3C meeting held in Seoul, I heard later.

I gave a brief talk about "Blogging and Knowledge-based Social Network". Though it was mostly about blogging on the "online web", I tried to touch the issue of blogging on the "mobile web" as well, recollecting some of my (often frustrating) memories from my Samsung years. Some major points I made across in my talk:

• 2007 was the year of blogging in Korea - Our company's blog service (called Tistory - now the property of Daum as we sold the service to them) was the only new addition to the top 10 Korean web destinations in the last three years
• The dividing line between blog and traditional media is quickly blurring - Bloggers are now essentially "media company CEOs"
• But the problem with blogging, though, is that it doesn't foster much community actions: No set profiles, lack of inherent social features other than comments and trackbacks, etc.
  
• The next generation blogging tool will be expected to address those issues, eventually leading to the creation of knowledge based social network among bloggers
  
• For mobile blogging to take off, manufacturers and carriers should step up. Let the browser access the phone's generic file system. Lower the network cost so people can comfortably send pics and videos to their blogs from their phones.
  

I also sat in one of panel discussions. To me the most interesting question from the audience was: When it comes to mobile social network, how can we ensure privacy issues?

For this, Opera's Charles McCathieNevile (second from left in the picture) answered something that sounded like the concept being developed in the web industry these days: "Social whitelisting" that's tied to data portability, like XFN blogroll whitelist.


I'll also speak at Web 2.0 Korea 2008 tomorrow with similar topics, but the conference will be an all-Korean one and therefore I won't be able to share much about the conference on this blog. Which is one reason I can't wait to make the English-language pan-Asian conference happen. Lately I've been up to this, and I'll update on it in a separate post.