Yes, you heard it right. I'm in Tokyo to attend Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo. This will be my fourth conference this year: Web 2.0 Expo in SF in April, Supernova in SF in June, State of Play V in Singapore in August, and this one; but this is my first trip to Japan.
I'm in Tokyo with the openmaru team. Here goes my discloser: I've been working with openmaru, a Korean Web 2.0 service provider, for its English blog marketing. Indeed, its English blog has been run by me! (but I'm not an employee, just working on a partnership-based project)
I'm not sure if you guys have come across the blog or any of its services, but not because I'm the marketer, but even from a pure user point of view, you should most definitely try out the openmaru applications, such as Springnote. It simply rocks!
I'll be reporting from the Expo as well as interviewing famous dudes and companies in the Web 2.0-sphere. One thing interesting is that reporting will be done through 4 major channels: openmaru Korean blog, openmaru English blog, Taewoo's log (my Korean blog), and TechnoKimchi. Chances are I'll be posting a lot more stuff in Korean than in English.
But if you ever had questions regarding openmaru or me, or the Web and digital landscape in Korea, feel free to come around the openmaru booth to find me. I'm not there, other openmaru members will be more than kind enough to find me for you :)
I'm very excited to attend the conference for many reasons. But for TechnoKimchi, I think this will definitely mark an important milestone as this is the first time I'm officially exploring the Web in Asia, outside Korea. As I've been writing in my Korean blog, there are so many things that are just completely different about the Web and the digital culture in Japan from Korea that I'm almost lost. Too many thoughts in my head.
But for now, I'm resting for tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll be able to run into some of you guys!
I realized that I've been getting a huge traffic to this blog since the CNN broadcast. I've also been learning that this blog is not in its most user-friendly format: if you're a first-timer to this blog, chances are you'll probably get lost, not knowing where to begin.
So, I've decided to become my own editor for the day. I picked out some articles which I thought might be most interseting to you.
Luckily, I haven't written too many posts on this blog yet, making it not too difficult to pick out the articles.
So, here is the list. You probably want to read them in the order listed below. Have fun!
And, oh yeah. If you want to contact me, please don't hesitate to email me at
CNN is featuring a whole series called "Eye on South Korea". You'll purely love it! It's basically everything I've been trying to say at TechnoKimchi: what's it's like to have a digital generation like in Korea.
You can watch the video clip of my interview HERE.
At first, I thought it was really incredible that a little boy like me could be featured on such prestigious media like CNN. And it was possible because of this blog: THEY FOUND ME THROUGH TECHNOKIMCHI!
It's just so weird. Tons of people have been contacting me since the broadcast. Lots of people actually searched for the term "technokimchi" to land at this blog. What a day!
Below are some pictures taken from the set. I'll go over more on CNN: Eye on South Korea in the coming days! Until then, hurrah!
Hello, everyone. It's been a long long time since I basically "stopped" posting here. Which is pretty sad :( It's just been crazy last couple of weeks, but with so many things coming up in the next weeks, I just had to switch my mode to the "blogging" mode again. And here I am :)
After reading my first article, many have contacted and asked me to give even more snapshots of what the digital generation looks like here.
Well, well, well. None other than our dear Chang-Won Kim, a close friend of mine, the blogger behind Web 2.0 Asia, a CEO of the largest blogging tool provider in Korea (the article was written before he became of the CEO of the company), and also an old Samsung buddy of mine, wrote up a really really nice article on the exactly same topic, only better than my own version :)
So, here are some notable lines from his article. Don't just try to chew on it. Swallow it and digest it. Take a deep breath and imagine what a life like this could do for education, business, culture, and even technology. What he describes in the article is very very typical of a Korean boy in my opinion.
So here we go!
...But these days, Insoo and his friends don't simply
use their phones to send an SMS, or to take pictures or listen to MP3
music. Whenever funny things happen during the day, Insoo and friends
shoot video with their phones and send the clip to portal sites, hoping
their clips will be featured on the portals' homepages.
...The first thing Insoo does after Hakwon is, of course, turn on the
PC. Insoo has a difficult math problem as homework. He posts it up on
Naver Knowledge iN, a popular online Q&A service with some 70
million entries.
Within about 10 minutes of posting, someone chimes in with a good
answer, and Insoo awards him with some "Knowledge Power" points --
knowledge-based economy in action among 14-year-olds.
...Gone are the days when kids bought CDs by their favorite singers.
For the young generation, music is deemed something that must be
consumed over the 'Net -- CDs are for their parents. To date, Cyworld's
minihompy streaming music sales amount to more than 200 million songs,
or $100 million in revenue.
I wasn't able to write too much after the first session. So, rather I'm going to try to put down the summaries of the last 3 sessions I had today.
Regulating Virtual Worlds
Legal experts explore how controversies related to intellectual property, real-money transfer, gaming as political speech, time-limit addiction laws and the policing of Internet cafes play out throughout the region. They will also draw our attention to culturally variable assumptions that underpin analytical approaches to these issues.
Much of the panel discussion revolved around whether it's better to have communities self-regulate or have external forces to step in. At large, there are three forces at play: 1) community of players regulating themselves, 2) game and virtual world makers deciding what needs to happen within through creating systems certain way, 3) actual regulating bodies like the government. Many factors come into play here. Obviously, it'll be the best if all the players and communities act reasonable enough to reach certain social agreements and norms to control themselves; however, not quite so in reality. That's what makes things complicated. Besides, creating laws and regulations for a world that doesn't really exist is a very difficult task itself. For example, let's say there is a crime in Second Life. What country's law should be applied to that member? Is it for Linden Lab to decide? Or should the U.S. government intervene? What if the player was Korean?
Education, Kids, and Teens in Virtual Worlds
There has been an explosion of interest in the use of virtual worlds in education. This panel will examine what works and what doesn’t work, and will present some ideas for the effective use of online spaces for student learning. It will also ask examine how children and teens interact within virtual worlds, and what this teaches us about building kid-and-teen-friendly environments for learning and playing.
This session was very interesting because I've always known there's so much learning, in a non-traditional sense, that could be done through an environment like virtual worlds. People indeed train themselves and learn a great deal in this kind of environment. They set goals for themselves, leadership becomes visible, and they collaborate with each other to solve certain problems. Some of the examples in the session were astonishing--like teaching classes in StarWars Galaxy. Now how much of this could be applied to the real world education?
Currently the real world education system is designed for a world back in 1950's. Kids are growing up enormously influenced by the digital technology. They are a lot more participatory also. The social and economic scenes are changing faster than ever due to the Internet. Unfortunately, none of this is reflected in the current one-way-teaching and text-based education system. For us to be able to adopt the opportunities given by virtual worlds and other technologies, we need a completely new mindset.
However, not everything can be learned in virtual worlds, obviously. It's our job to figure what virtual worlds can offer in this space. It seems at the moment that virtual worlds are good providing an environment in which people can come together to collaborate to solve certain problems, rather than learning specific skill sets.
Connecting East and West
Experts explore variations in playing styles, the influence of game mechanics on cross-cultural cooperation, the challenge of intercultural communication, and outcomes of forced localization. This panel will also explore issues of society, governance and virtual worlds as a vehicle for people-to-people diplomacy.
Well, as you know, that's the goal of this blog. I want to let known to the world what's here in Korea and Asia and see if we can make any connections between East and West. I was actually one of the panelists during this session. But, I wasn't invited as an "official" panelist, but rather as a translator to Judge Unggi Yoon, who is a very well-respected member here. He'd explain what the MMORPGs are like in Korea and I'll translate that into English for the audience. But, hey, I was still up on the stage. What an honor! ;)
The session covered various topics ranging from the two different purposes of playing games in Lineage and Second Life, gold-farming, index for measuring the east/west-ness and etc. I really enjoyed the session while listening on the side most of the time. We definitely need to take a more analytical approach to crossing the gap. While there are fundamental differences between the two which will never get any closer than they are right now, there are also a growing number of commonalities among the two that something could be done for further development. The most important point of the session, I guess, was acknkowledging the value of the differences and how the differences indeed enrich our virtual world experiences.
- - -
Just like every time I attend a conference, I really enjoyed meeting new people and having conversations with them. It's simply because you get to learn so much by doing so. For me, this is a completely new experience: the first time being in Singapore and first time being immersed in the virtual worlds talk.
I'm very excited for tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to bring even more interesting stuff to you all.
These virtual worlds are crucial building blocks of global civil society. As such, they harbor the promise for relationship-building and cooperation across national borders. Solutions to the cross-cultural growing pains of this new medium require a sincere commitment to transnational dialogue.
As I briefly mentioned before, in order to appropriately cover the digital generation in Asia, the gaming culture and industry, now expanded to virtual worlds altogether, must be extensively studied. Unfortunately, my expertise has been more on Web 2.0 and Enterprise IT industry in general, not so much games and virtual worlds.
But they're all coming together. I get to interact with lots of kids of age 5-15 or so at church and they live in a different world than the one I grew up in. (I'm only 28 by the way). They don't seem to draw the line between the "real" world and the "virtual" world. The two worlds are so interchangable in their lives. What's imaginary and what's physical? They don't care and they don't know, but it's all in their minds. I get to talk to people working at NCSoft and Nexon, two largest game companies in Korea, and Cyworld. AND I HEAR SOME CRAZY STORIES FROM THEM.
IBM is training their employees in Second Life. When I attended Supernova in June, there was this great session on virtual worlds and I remember Raph Koster, one of the gurus in the field, saying "many of the Web 2.0 principles and phenomenon have come from games." I totally agree with him, especially as far as how social interactions are concerned.
I go to PC bangs and see middle/high school guys in their school uniforms spend 4 hours straight playing Starcraft, Lineage, WoW, FIFA, etc. after school. What's scary is how this is such a big part of their lives. I mean their real lives.
What would happen when you combine everything together? I mean combining different virtual worlds with blogs, mobile, social networks, and messengers. Maybe some efforts towards standardization would help? What if you can play WoW on the bus for an hour using Wibro on the way to school? What if your Cyworld buddy can be found on Club Penguin? Possibilities are endless, I think.
Of course, we'll be seeing various social and legal issues come up in this fast-developing medium as well. I know much about what's up with social networks and blogs. Can the same principles be applied to virtual worlds? What's the same? What's different?
We'll find out at the conference. I'm not sure if I'll be able to live-blog the conference, given I don't know much about the wireless connections at the site. But I'll be constantly feeding you guys with what I learn there. And trust me, what I'll be learning there will be extremely important to anyone who has anything to do with anything digital--Web 2.0/portal services, H/W & gadget makers, game makers, social networks makers, book publishers, network providers, teachers, legislators, parents, kids, or even HR people.
Should I go, "stay tuned and excited" again? ;) Well, I am!
As the TechnoKimchi blogger, I tend to hunt for things that give you even the slightest hint at something from the Asian Web reflected in the West Web. And today, I caught a big fish. It was on none other than ESPN!
I've explained before that I'm a crazy fan of NBA, so obviously NBA on ESPN is one of my daily destinations. Today I went back and saw this little thingy called "OTL".
I was like "What? Can't believe this!" because, as you know, ESPN is so..well, American. For your information, "OTL" (also widely known as "orz") is an Asian emoticon for expressing frustration or despair. If you closely look at it, it looks like a frustrated man on his knees. O is the head, T is the body and the arms, and L is the legs. The same with orz. A little Chinese video clip on variations of orz:
Anyhow, the article link was about this NBA ref who has been changing the games he officiated because of his association with big time gambling. So the use of OTL there looked perfectly justified because he has been the biggest and the saddest news around NBA for a while (until Kevin Garnett went to the Celtics to join Paul Pierce and Ray Allen).
Anyhow, I was so excited. I saw it as an Asian culture invasion. If you see it on ESPN, that's it. End of story. It was indeed a big fish for me. Yay!
Except for that my ectasy only lasted for few more minutes. I found this:
And this is how I literaly reacted upon my own discovery:
Anyhow, this is my own OTL story of the day. But seriously, when it comes to emoticons in Asia, there's also so much to talk about. In Asia, we live in a different metaphysical world that emoticons come out differently as well. More on it later.
When I saw that, something clicked. So I went back to the page and checked out the interview materials at the end of the document, only to realize that this is the project for which I was interviewed with. Last month, Manpreet Singh SARAN, from Singapore, working on a communications class project, emailed me, asking me about the Web 2.0 environment in Korea. I was able to answer the questions, which, in turn, were used to create the page. How awesome! I'm just glad that I was able to help.
Here's a link to the PDF version of my email interview. Just in case, I'm copying and pasting the whole text to this post as well. (I made changes to and polished up some of my comments down there because they were either gramaticaly wrong or I missed/misspelled some words, etc.)
Thanks, Lawrence and Manpreet!
1) A decision to require Web readers to use their real identities when posting articles online on Internet news sites is sparking concerns over privacy and free speech. What is your view on this?
While there’s been a great number of occasions where anonymity caused lots of real world problems in Korea, I don’t think the real identity regulation will be the cure for all. There will be lots of new problems springing from this kind of approach: freedom of speech will be threatened in many ways as there’ll be lots of people unable to honestly expressing their opinions. Privacy is obviously even a bigger concern. Making your real name up there won’t naturally create more responsible comments online. It’ll reduce both good and bad behaviors online. I’d say rather urging and educating many Internet users and companies to create an environment where people will be more responsible will eventually pay out.
2) What are some of the restrictions that the Korean online community is facing which prevents for further development in social media?
Practical applications, like flickr of del.icio.us, aren’t really taking off in Korea. Most of the popular applications except search are about making sites people-friendly. It’s social nature of the Web users in Korea, which I believe need some change.
3) What impact does citizen journalism have on the social media arena in Korea? How are sites like News 2.0 driving change?
Unfortunately, News 2.0 isn’t actually doing particularly well in Korea. OhMyNews has also lost its brightest shining moments as well. Online media has been completely concentrated around portals, like Naver and Daum, where both mainstream media and citizen-based media (often called UCC-User Created Content) are both very strong.
We actually have seen incidents like Dog Poop Girl so many times that many people are almost numb to such things happening. People carry around digital cameras and camcorders all the time that you basically have eyes and ears everywhere. People sometimes try to act more responsibly out in public since they know the horrifying and tremendous consequences of things spreading so quickly online. Often people take for granted how (private) things can be discovered so easily. It’s happening at a greater scale and there isn’t much that can stop it from happening, I think.
5) How are Korean businesses using Web 2,0 to their advantages? Please highlight an example. For example, how are businesses leveraging on Naver?
The best case is obviously Naver Knowledge-iN, which has used user participation to answer other users' questions. This mechanism eventually made Naver the Wikipedia + Google of Korea. We have seen a very high level of participation among the Web users in Korea across many areas. However, Internet companies, especially portals, have been accused of not being particularly keen at opening up their services to the masses.
6) Why is the Korea online community so advanced in terms of using social networking sites(e.g. CyWorld) and Web 2.0 applications? Does Korean Culture or Government play a part in this?
It’s mainly two things: a great broadband connection (this is the govenment part) and a culture where everyone just loves flocking together. Unlike MySpace, Cyworld is much about “decorating” your own space with lots of fancy stuff, like avatars and virtual items. That’s played a great deal in the development of services like Cyworld.
7) How different is the Korean online community different from other communities in terms of internet behavior with regard to social networking sites?
The active Web participants in Korea in general are much younger in contrast to other countries, especially the Western ones. So we see a Web that is a lot more social and entertainment-oriented than heavy and more serious one in the West. Lots of bloggers in Korea only write about travelling, food, photography, relationships, or games while many in U.S., for example, would write about business, tech, and media.
8) At the moment, what are new exciting Web 2.0 developments taking place in the Korean Online Community?
There’s been a good number of venture startups putting efforts into developing the new “web 2.0” services in Korea. As mentioned above, the Web in Korea has been greatly concentrated around portals. While there has not been too many great success stories among those startups yet, many portals are slowly moving in the direction of finally distributing more traffic to outside of the portals. I see it as a great sign of the Korean Web moving in the right direction. The Web was never meant to be so concentrated.
9) What are the signs that the lines between mainstream media and social media are blurring?
Daum, one of the major portals in Korea, has started a service named “Blogger News”, where it’s a combination of Digg and OhMyNews. It’s trying to find the right balance between a completely user-based quality news and professional journalism. Many of the content sites, including blogs, video sites, and picture sites, are also displaying and leading traffic to both mainstream content and user generated content. What we often see is the social media content generated off one big mainstream news article.
Today, I introduced TechnoKimchi to my Korean blog readers. Just to flex my muscle again, my Korean blog Taewoo's log has about 5,000 RSS subscribers and 4,000 daily visitors. You might ask "why are you so full of yourself?" I'd go "Aren't we living in the age of attention economy, anyways?" :)
But seriously, Asian people are "supposedly" humble. So until proved otherwise, I'll remain humble. Another ":)"
Anyhow, I'm thinking I'll probably get over 1,000 visitors today for the first time since TechnoKimchi was launched. Much traffic will be from my Korean blog. So I got even more full of myself and decided to do some more vanity search and I google for "technokimchi".
Some of the interesting facts from the site (all in quotes):
South Korea has a population of 49 million. 14.3 million out of the country's 15.9 million households nationwide are linked to broadband Internet connections as of May 2007. In particular, Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi Province posted 106.8 percent and 100.7 percent in the broadband penetration rate, respectively.
The average person visited the internet 13.8 days a month, and spent 20.2 hours viewing 2,172 pages--below the global averages of 17.1 days, 25.2 hours, and 2,519 pages. However, South Koreans topped the world averages--with scores of 17.4 days, 31.2 hours and 4,546 pages.
According to the new research report by ROA Group the number of mobile users in South Korea will reach 41.95 million by 2010, which is 85% of the total population.
In South Korea, a single service (Cyworld) already has 18 million accounts—enough for 30 % of the entire country's population. The survey was done in 30 days. Within that 30 days, more than half of all Internet users in South Korea have accessed a social networking site.
Between 2001 and 2006, the Korean online advertising market's volume grew at annualized 48 per cent compared to entire advertising market's 4.6 per cent yearly growth during the same period.
In the event where any law suits arose from the online activities, portal operators can disclose this private information to the court. The disadvantage that this law brings about is the disruption to freedom of speech. People will feel that they are being restricted into giving their comments.
There were many cases where teenagers had spent more than a day continuously playing computer games. Some of them eventually collapsed from exhaustion and passed away.
People cheering during World Cup 2006 around the Seoul City Hall Square
"Pali Pali (빨리빨리)" is known to be the first phrase which those start working in Korea are required to learn. What does "Pali Pali" mean? It means, "Hurry Hurry" or "Faster Faster". People in Korea are hardcore like that.
While the title of this post "Things are crazy over here" is obviously meant to catch your attention a bit, I really do mean that things could get quite crazy over here in terms of the pace of things changing.
I'm a huge NBA fan, especially of the Miami Heat. I went back to U.S. for a business trip about a year ago, first time in 3 years. I was watching the NBA playoffs on TNT and ESPN, the first impression I got was "nothing's changed in 3 years!" Ads looked the same. TV presentations looked the same. Even the guys on the show, including dear Kenny and Charles, were the same! Not bad after all, right?
NBA was only one of many things that didn't seem to have changed. The language, people, food, atmosphere, etc. You might ask "Well, how much change do you really expect just in 3 years??"
Things are quite different in Korea, though. Language changes a great deal in 3 years. So does what we eat. So does what we wear. Even what we watch. 5 years ago we were only watching Korean soap operas. Now everyone's watching Heroes or Prison Break over here, thanks to various P2P applications.
Why do things change and go around so fast and we still work so many hours? I don't know. Maybe we are all unproductive workers. Maybe we don't have firm principles or philosophies that govern and tie together the society in general, which keep weird changes from happening. Maybe people are just having fun running out of breath every time there's another change to adapt themselves to.
But more than anything, it's all cultural again. In Asia, things are often about people only. This often means when a small group of people start changing and making a noise, it can spread through the rest of the world at lightning speed without people considering the bigger pictures behind it. You see butterfly effects happening everywhere all the time. May I remind you of the word "emergence"? I'm not sure if you can apply of any of those complex network theories to the way we interact with each other over here, but it surely feels like it.
Well, then. What about the Web? It changes so fast that it's lierally crazy. I mentioned above our language changing so fast. It's actually because there are so many jargons being born on the Web that it directly influences how we express ourselves. If you say a phrase that was popular on the Web even a year ago, you're already not cool any more. News that comes up on portal news sites, the most powerful journalistic institutions in Korea now, which I'll cover later, can affect so many people that one picture taken with a cellphone and uploaded by a high school student in subway gets viewed by half of the entire Korean population the next day, stirs up the whole nation, and forces politicians to change the law within a week.
If you really think about it, this "craziness" or "intractability" is what represents the new Web. Things are crazy and cannot be controlled. Korean people are so used to that. We've been living like that for decades even before the Web was born.
So what's the conclusion of this post? I miss the laid-back culture in California. I miss the diversity in New York. But I'm here now and things are running only faster because of the Web. Sometimes because of the insanity I'm used to here, many things found in Techmeme seem to be a warmup session to me.
Like I said, the gap is closing. Trust me. Things are only getting crazier for everybody. Maybe we're all just doomed like this dude. Ask any dedicated blogger.
People have asked me, "why do you feel compelled to start another blog when there are already 80 million out there and you're running 7 blogs?"
The need was born quite naturally. I'm from Korea and I'm subscribed to something like 150 feeds, mostly English content. While most of the "Web 2.0" stories have been coming from the Western part of the world, I've been increasingly convinced that there's so much happening over here in Korea that just simply must not go unnoticed. Moreover, I've been seeing, time after time, that things that happen in Korea end up taking place in U.S years later.
It's probably because
we have better broadband connections and mobile infrastructures,
we have a better "gadget culture" where teens are not hesitant to easily spend $500 on mobile phones or PMPs, all coming at the expense of their parents,
we have a culture which values the virtue of "flocking together" much higher than that of "staying as individuals", empowering the growth of mass collaborative efforts across the Net, and
we have a mental world where the virtual stuff is often blurred with the physical reality.
Of course, there are many other reasons why this is happening, but this is the short list I could come up with. All of these factors together have enabled the younger generation in Korea to experience the "digital society" much earlier than those in other parts of the world.
While I could much talk about the cold and dry biz/tech aspect of the whole picture, I feel that's already being sufficiently done by some of those 80 million other blogs. I'd rather like to focus on the social dynamics, cultures, and economics behind the scene. Definitely, there's a reason why the fancy and pretty Cyworld works in Korea and the coarse and logical MySpace works in U.S. Cultures matter and we're not gonna change the cultures in Asia and Americas and Europe over night just because we're now all connected to each other through HTTP. Accordingly, many of the things I talk about in this blog might be simply irrelevant to many people that are looking for business opportunities using the principles derived from Asia and applying them to the U.S. or European market.
But, here's what's important. The gap between the young generation in East and West is closing. The reason is because better broadband and mobile infrastructures are now set place in the West while the East is learning to be somewhat more "logical" and "open" on the Web like the West has been. However, more than anything, the digital generation from both East and West is developing a culture that is commonly observed across all different countries, philosophies, races, ethnicities, languages, and continents. Seriously, an average 6th grader from Japan has a much higher chance to be like an average 6th grader from Canada than ever before. They play games, send numerous SMS messages to friends, listen to mp3s through iPod. What does that say about business opportunities? Plenty, I think.
