For many personal and professional reasons, this blog has not been really taken care of for...say 2 months or so. But now it's 2008 and I'm ready to get it going again.
Fortunately, I've had a chance to talk to A LOT of people last couple of months in real life, over skype, and through email, etc. What's amazing is that people are still very interested in what's happening here in Korea. Of course, things here simply rock :)
Good news is that I'm getting my Wibro modem back tomorrow. To tell you the truth, I had lost it months ago and because of how the contract was structured, I wasn't able to get a new modem till now. Once I get it, you know TechnoKimchi is going WILD again!
Thanks for your patience and interests. I've needed some time to grow as a person more than anything, overcoming some of the personal hardships. (Yes, I was secretely in love with this girl and it didn't quite work out, so you know how hard that must've been --> this is when you use the expression "OTL") I think I'm through now and ready to fly for another exciting year.
By the way, my book is out. It's named "Meconomy", meaning that the current "Web 2.0" landscape encourages and even empowers individuals, (i.e. ME) to be the center of the economic force. You can purchase the Korean version of it HERE. Sorry, folks, so far it's ONLY in Korean, but for anyone who's interested, I'm up for publishing it in another language! If you're interested, please let me know.
I'll do my best to bring you all some good news and insight about the digital generation here. It'll be about e-sports league, digital devices, citizen journalism, Google vs. Naver, the new 3-D Cyworld, the importance of cultural understanding when going global, and some personal stories as well.
Just for your information, this is how I'm going to be smiling all year in 2008. See ya all soon :)
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.
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!
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.
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.
