Web 2.0 Asia

As mentioned on a previous post, Agora, Korean portal site Daum's web forum service, has been on fire during the recent (ongoing, actually) anti-beef-import candlelight protests.

It turned out that (link in Korean) the top 3.3% of the users contributed for nearly half of the whole posts; top 10% accounted for 71% of the entire postings.

This is a (rather dramatic) case that shows there are so few content creators (as opposed to content consumers) on the web. So forget about 20/80 rule - it's more like 10/70, or even 3/50.

Oh, by the way, this is crazy: The top 10 users logged whopping 21,180 posts during the last two months or so, averaging nearly 30 posts per day/person. Remember we're talking about long articles, sometimes really really long. And most articles are well-written, as the authors are well aware of how much of hateful comments they will get if they do a crappy post.

Of course these folks are not paid for their work or anything like that. Hey, Techcrunch writers - did you guys just whine "too many posts, too little time"? ;)

Tossi is a Twitter-like service in Korea, trying to differentiate itself from the pack by emphasizing on the mobile aspect (quite naturally - the service is provided by SK Telecom, Korea's #1 mobile carrier.)

Tossi is running an interesting promotion to drive usage from mobile devices. The service gives you a daily mission to accomplish, which requires taking a photo with camera phone and uploading the photo to Tossi via MMS.

On the following screen shot is a new mission, "Show us the sky above you now". The winners get mobile coupon for a free Starbucks latte.

It's an interesting marketing initiative, but it can also be an evidence that still not many people are aware of, or using, the Twitter-like service from their mobile phones.

Yesterday I spoke at Business Blog Summit (link in Korean) - I talked about the new blog service we've launched recently in Korea, which I'll spare on this blog.

As the name suggests, Business Blog Summit is mainly about how companies and organizations can leverage blog and other types of social media. Most of the audience were young marketing folks, who I assume are often told by their bosses to "go learn about this blogging thing".

Here's some stuff from the conference that I think would be interesting to those outside of Korea as well:

Kia's manager, Mr Ryu, talked about the car company's corporate blog called Kia Buzz (about which I wrote here). Kia studied the lifestyle of average car buyers and figured it's meaningless to focus their marketing efforts only on the old media. Hence the needs of a global blog, but Ryu said running a corporate blog turned out to be so challenging that Kia thought about quitting it altogether many times.

They realized the best content they could offer was actually the real-life stories from actual car designers and engineers. But the challenge was finding contributors without explicit benefit (except for some free dinners :-). Also, many of the behind-the-scene folks at Kia were Koreans, so they also had the language issue as well.

But after months of effort, Kia Buzz contributed significantly to the increased brand awareness - and also could send out more "human" voice, such as Kia Azerbaijan sponsoring the national arm-wrestling competition (which wouldn't have been known outside of Azerbaijan if it wasn't for this Kia Buzz blog).


Also interesting was a "hospital blog" run by Kim's eye hospital. This is no average mom and pop clinic by the way - it's the biggest eye hospital in Asia with 40+ surgeons and 400K+ outpatients. Dr. Kim from the hospital said he felt  hospitals had to provide more objective medical information, as today such an overwhelming part of the messages coming from hospitals are of promotional nature. (Try "LASIK" on Naver search.)

So Kim's Eye hospital started a blog where they put up medical information (not in a promotional voice) and real-life stories happening at their hospital (which should be quite interesting - that's why medical dramas like ER have been so popular on TV). As the first "hospital blog", the site drew lots of media attention - a first mover advantage.

Also, I didn't know until this conference that City of Seoul runs a blog! City of Seoul has been blogging since March 2004, and blogging is an important initiative for the city as it aims to attract 12M+ tourists this year. These days, tourists find information mostly from blogs - so the city is planning to do Chinese and English blogging on the likes of QQ and Myspace. (It's pretty interesting they mentioned QQ first - surely Seoul wants to attract many tourists from China.)

Venturebeat's Eric Eldon reports "Friendster’s growth in Asia could make it the top social network in the world, once again." The article quotes Friendster's claim that they are the number one social network service in Asia, leading everyone (Facebook, Myspace, Mixi, Cyworld) by a big margin.


Wait a minue.. Friendster number one in Asia? Every day, I'm getting emails from Facebook and LinkedIn about a new friend request or new updates from my friends. But I haven't had a single email from Friendster for a long time. So at least for me, Friendster doesn't feel like a very active service - But then I may not be profiled as an "average" internet user in Asia.

Stats like these bring a question to my mind: Will the Western/US social network services (Myspace, FB, Friendster) take over the Asian market eventually? Or, will one of the local players (Mixi, Cyworld, 51.com) come out as the Asia's social network winner, transforming itself into a regional market leader that can compete neck-and-neck with Myspace and FB in the global market? Or will every single Asian market have its own social network of choice, without going the consolidation route? What do you think?

OECD Ministerial Meeting is being held in Seoul, Korea, on 17-18 June 2008. As the theme of the meeting for this meeting is "The Future of the Internet Economy", I was honored to be asked to contribute a piece on emerging web technology.

The following is my article - a pretty high-level overview on Naver's domination in the Korean market and the pressure on the company to embrace the open internet further. I tried to be as objective as possible - Trust me, I'm not a blind-folded Naver basher. It's a rather long article (2 1/2 pages long) but it will be a good food for thought, even for those outside of the Korean web industry. For better viewing, click on the top rightmost button (fullscreen mode).

On June 13, I was at the OpenSocial Conference '08. Here's my coverage:

The 450-capacity auditorium was packed – showing the high interest in open platform technologies. First up was the keynote by Chul-soo Ahn, the president of Ahnlab and a professor at KAIST teaching entrepreneurship. His keynote was about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and in Korea - a rather classic topic, but more relevant as Ahn has just come back from the Valley after being there for years. He asserted that Korean entrepreneurs and startup employees should be more focused rather than being "generalists"; also that Korean venture capital should not be a mere "money-loaning bank".

Next, Hyunsoo Hwang, a manager at Cyworld gave a talk about Cyworld and the open internet. Interesting he should say about Cyworld and the open internet as the service is widely regarded as a rather closed service... Anyways, he said Cyworld is trying to implement open data interchange with third parties - For example, if you write a book review on Cyworld's minihompy, the same review might one day also appear on the online bookstore's website.

What I found interesting was Hwang's talk on the social network monetization. Hwang said that the reason why contextual ads work very well on internet search is because the service knows the user's intention. So that means if there's a way social networks can also capture people's intention right (which should be very challenging), then he doesn't see why contextual ads on social networks should not work well too.

It is well known that Cyworld is actually one of only few social network services around the world that generate enough profit, by selling digital items such as background music or avatars. It's interesting that Cyworld seems to be focusing on improving search experience these days - Has Cyworld's digital items revenue hit the wall or something? Is Cyworld interested in generating search-related revenues, such as contextual ads? I don't know..

Traditionally, Cyworld's hottest service has been photo album. But lately, Cyworld diary, a short-form blog of sort, has picked up significant usage. Probably the same reason why Twitter has been popular - people are busier, and they want quick and easy writing over putting up pics.

It turns out that 60% of Cyworld visits occur among 1-chon (i.e. friends) while 40% among non-friends. These statistics from one of the major social networks of the world verifies that social networks are mostly for strengthening the relationships among those who already know each other.

In another session, Kyosuk Song Andy Kyoseok Song at Ahnlab introduced IDtail, the first Korean service (and the fourth in the world) that fully implemented open social. I've heard unofficially quite a few times that this service is one of the best practices (if not the best) of open social technologies.

IDTail is basically a Linkedin-like service an OpenSocial-based social network service. It's an open social container into which various open social apps can be plugged. Song said that after rolling out open social apps, IDtail's unique visitors increased by 250%.

In the following session, Sangsuk Lee of 3Cim Korea shared some "inside stories" related to open social. This interesting Korean startup is based in Silicon Valley and in Korea, and runs a photo widget service called MagToo and MagShow.

After developing application based in open social, they say that opensocial's promise of “Write once, run everywhere” should be taken with a grain of salt – different service providers have different specs, and for their own case, they could launch only on Myspace despite working for over 4 months on Opensocial. But they say Open Social certainly cuts down the development time.

Their application, Magshow, shows well what an OpenSocial application can do;  Magshow allows Facebook or other social network users to display all their friends' pictures in one place (such as under profile) without having to visit each one's page.

For the coming days, I'll blog about these:

Open social conference Korea 2008: This conference is held on June 12, hosted by ID Tail (No English page unfortunately), a spin-off from Ahnlab (Korea's prominent security software company) that is dedicated for rolling out apps based on open social and other open web technologies. The reason why you shouldn't shrug off this conference as just one of the numerous other open social conference is that ID Tail is being regarded by many as the best commercial implementation of open social technologies.

Update on the Open Web Asia '08: Though I've been quiet about this conference so far, a number of people have been working hard on making this conference happen, and there are many exciting updates. We have the dates and venue (October 14th, Seoul Korea, Sheraton Walker Hill) and have partnered with one of the Asia's most prestigious conferences. Programs and potential speaker lineup is being worked up by some leading bloggers and industry experts in and around the Asian web industry. Oh, I almost forgot to say the conference will be called the Open Web Asia '08. Stay tuned.

OECD Ministerial meeting: I was honored to contribute an article to Korea Times special edition, the only official media material to be distributed during the OECD Ministerial meeting held in Seoul next week. The theme of this meeting is "The Future of the Internet Economy", and my contribution, titled "Walled Garden: a Double-edged Sword", will talk about Naver and more. After the embargo, I'll put the whole article on this blog.

Business Blog Summit '08: I'll be participating and speaking at the Business Blog Summit '08, a conference looking at how blogs are changing the business in general. Lots of web and PR folks are coming. My talk will focus on the new blogging service we've been working on the past several months, Textcube.com (yeah, between blogging and conference organizing, I do have a day job :-) ). I'll try and post the insights learned from the conference.

WISIA is another service from IWIlab, a US- and Korea-based web startup founded by Brian Kim, the former CEO of NHN USA. Again NHN is the company operating Naver, Korea's top internet portal.

I introduced an English based service called Buru.com on this blog before - Apparently Buru is not the only service rolled out by IWIlab. Unlike Buru, Wisia is offered only in Korean for the time being.


Wisia is basically a social recommendation service. It's like a Q&A service (such as Naver's knowledge search or Yahoo Answers) focusing entirely on recommendations. A user can either put up a new question, or search through questions already posted by others seeking for good recommendations. Questions include "Where are the best spots I can take family during the holidays?" or "What do twenty-somethings have to have, in order to become happier?"

Click on one of these questions, and if there are enough answers (that is, the recommendations) posted already, the user goes directly to the voting page. For example, when I click on the question "Where are the best spots I can take family during the holidays?", I am directed to the poll, where I'm supposed to pick my favorite first. Here I'm choosing "Sullak Waterpia".


Then I can see the poll result, i.e. where my selection is ranked at. Here I can see Sullak Waterpia is ranked at the second place (second most voted option for the family vacation place), and see my selection was also supported by other folks.



If I don't think a given recommendation is not ranked high enough, I can click to vote it. Or if I believe there are other good items that are not yet listed, I can scroll down and click on the "Add item" option. I am adding "Jirisan" as a new item of a good spot to take my family.


Adding an item can be done in a brisk. Wisia provides built-in Google image search (via mashup, I suppose), so I can choose the right image to go with the item and write a short message as to why I recommend this item. Placing the Google image search upfront is Wikia's way of encouraging users to insert the accompanying images to go with their posts. Wisia knows very well that pictures say a thousand words. As a result, most recommendations that appear on Wisia seem to have images.


At least in Korea, knowledge search was what catapulted Naver into its current leading position (which I'll discuss in further detail in my next piece.) Wisia, when done right, can be a better alternative to Naver's knowledge search for those specifically seeking for recommendations. Other services also to note include 43 things, 43 places, and Should do this.

Joop Dorresteijn over at the Next Web wrote a piece on Korean web, for which I contributed via email interviews:

Today, South Korea is the most connected country on earth, but the funny thing is that we hardly hear anything about Korea’s web scene. This made us curious about what websites are popular over there, and if Korea has a web 2.0 scene. To find that out, we reviewed the three visited websites in Korea and we interviewed Chang W. Kim, Korean web 2.0 enthusiast and initiator of the Open Web Asia ‘08 conference.

... Chang has written before about why so little South Korean companies get ‘Techcrunched‘. He thinks that it’s related to the lack of efforts to bring the Asian Web 2.0 innovations to the attention of the rest of the world. “Less effort to get these companies known, less attention to Asian Web 2.0 industry, less venture money flowing in, less number of startups, and so on.”

Which is why we are making such initiatives as the Open Web Asia workgroup (initiated by Gang Lu at Mobinode) and the Open Web Asia '08 conference (for which an update post is long overdue - check back here next week.)

The whole Korean society is literally in frenzy now. Just look at this picture. We have protests like these every single day in Seoul.


So what happened? Here's my one paragraph summary for you: The new Korean president Mr Lee hastily signed the US beef import agreement, without paying close attention to banning the kind of beef that might potentially cause mad cow disease. Fitting his nickname "bulldozer", Lee tried to push through his plan despite serious concerns. Amid this, the traditional media tried to play a cover-up game, accusing the public health concerns as unfounded rumors and the protesters as left-wing manipulators.

But the majority of protesters were not political minds - they were average Koreans who were deeply upset by the government and the old media. Given that many Koreans are web-savvy, always-connected, blogging-like-crazy folks, what we had was essentially millions of angry bloggers.

Ouch. You don't really want to imagine what happens when you have millions of angry bloggers.

Behind the massive physical protests, there are even more massive web activities: Protests are organized by mobile messages and broadcast on the internet live at the scene. But the government and traditional media embarrass themselves on a daily basis by not "getting it". The government once mistook Daum's Agora, the massively popular internet discussion forum, as some kind of secret political party. (Duh?)

It used to be so easy - the government could just set up a plan, push through it, let the media do its part. But the web 2.0 turned nearly every single Korean into a media figure. Now everyone ventilates his or her ideas on the internet, to which all others are responding back and forth - the amount of communication taking place grows exponentially. It ain't simple and easy anymore. If you want to lead people, you should do it in a 2.0 way, or you're doomed.

This is what Korean politicians and old media folks are slowly realizing (if they ever are, that is), in a very painful and costly way. Politicians around the world can learn some important lessons from what's happening in Korea - Are you there, Barack Obama?

PS. There's a deeper analysis on this matter on Taewoo's Technokimchi.