Wednesday, March 12, 2008

AsiaMedia :: KOREA: JoongAng Ilbo publisher questioned

AsiaMedia :: KOREA: JoongAng Ilbo publisher questioned:

"Hong Seok-hyun investigated for his acquisition of 'JoongAng Ilbo' shares from Samsung chairman

The Korea Herald
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
By Song Sang-ho

Hong Seok-hyun, chairman and publisher of the JoongAng Ilbo, was questioned yesterday as part of a special inquiry into corruption charges against Samsung Group.
'I will respond to the inquiry in earnest. There are false allegations, which I believe will be thoroughly cleared up,' Hong told reporters at the office of independent counsel Cho Joon-woong in southern Seoul."

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Web 2.0 Asia :: "Korean internet users are prisoners of their language barrier"

Web 2.0 Asia :: "Korean internet users are prisoners of their language barrier": "Michael Hurt left a long comment to my post 'Social network fatigue is clear and present'. To re-post the comment (with Michael's consent - boldings are mine):

Cyworld and their ilk are pumped-up, top-down, bloated extensions of Web 1.0-ware: Friendster/Cyworld are the same.

The difference between those and Facebook is that FB isn't a 'social networking site' per se, but a network and PLATFORM upon which 3rd-party developers can add all sorts of (monetizable) functionality.

That difference is seen in the success of Scrabulous, or the fact that any OTHER non-FB service can write a plugin for FB that adds the user's existing network to the utility if that particular application.

What you see is nearly unbounded potential in FB, whereas Cyworld is still very much just a MINI-'hompy.' Much more than they know, Cyworld is less than a homepage and not really much of anything else.

That's why I saw Cyworld moving anywhere outside of Korea as a stupidly arrogant mistake. I called this as soon as Cyworld went into the US and Europe.

The only reason half of the Korean Internet even remains used by the Korean population is because there's no other choice – they're prisoners of the Korean language barrier. If and when FB made a platform in other languages, namely Korean – goodbye Cyworld, with a quickness."

Web 2.0 Asia :: Myspace Korea launched

Web 2.0 Asia :: Myspace Korea launched: "Myspace Korea is up now, and the first thing I notice is that it's not just a simple word-by-word translation of the original Myspace service. The Korean version has its own site menus that include 'Minilog', something that's not found in the US version. Minilog is apparently the aggregation of snippets of messages composed by Myspacers. Overall, the site is quite well localized - but it remains to be seen if the service will become the 'post-Cyworld' in Korea."