Web 2.0 Asia

Naver, Korea's #1 portal, has always been under criticism that the service is too closed. Now Naver has brought an answer to the age-long criticism: It's called Open Cast. 

Naver Opencast, in a nutshell, is the feature that allows user to customize a certain section of Naver's main homepage by populating it with content feeds ("casts"), which themselves are generated and shared by other users. It's really a two way system. On the "casting" or "publishing" side, you can generate your own feeds or "casts" by hand-picking good content off the open web; On the "consuming" side, you can subscribe to the "casts" that have been published by other users and have it shown on the generic Naver homepage. 

In the sense that it allows user to customize the homepage, it's similar to My Yahoo or iGoogle, but Naver Opencast is more permanently placed as random content still appears even if the user is not logged in (if he's logged in, then his choice of Casts appear). It's like Yahoo permanently allocating certain section of its homepage for the user's customized space.

In the content value chain, there can be several players: Obvious ones include generators and consumers. But then there are also other important players, namely the "facilitators" or "mediators" - those who find good content, archive them, forward them, or comment on them. So the "Casters" are Naver's terms for these facilitators - those who are interested (or have expertise) in certain topical fields who surf the open web and find/share good content and share it for other users. They're like "digital curators", so to speak. By subscribing to their "Casts", user can find good content without surfing the whole web himself. That's the basic idea behind Opencast. 

Naver Opencast is in a closed beta, so you can only subscribe to feeds, not create them. So far the reactions from the blogosphere is generally good, especially the ease of use and clean UI. (There are some users who complain that they want to consume all content within Naver instead of constantly jumping to other sites, by the way. Maybe they've been too accustomed to portal's all-you-can-eat experience.)

Naver tries to fend off walled-garden criticism. It's been opening up more open APIs for developers, and now comes Opencast. Hope Naver's effort continues and Korean internet users are exposed to more open web, instead of having siloed experience among only a handful of portals.