Zuid Korea de frontrunners op internet?

Tijdens de al door diverse blogs besproken weblogconferentie in Parijs kwam op een gegeven moment een vraag wie er succesvoller zou zijn op het net, Europa of de VS. Na wat heen en weer gesteggel kwam een aanwezige chinees, Yat Siu met een subtiele opmerking dat het best wel eens China zou kunnen zijn. Het lastige voor ons is alleen dat wat er in het Verre Oosten gebeurt zich enigszins aan onze ogen onttrekt. Immers de meeste sites bevatten karakters die ons niets zeggen. Als dat wel het geval zou zijn, zouden we misschien Zuid Korea als het meest innovatieve internetland in de wereld bestempelen. Een van de opvallendste ondernemingen is daar Cyworld. Op het weblog van Communites DominateBrands kwam ik de volgende beschijving tegen:

To those familiar with our book or this blogsite, it is like marrying Habbo Hotel with mobile blogging. And a sure-fure hit. With already 15 Million users, CyWorld has become the must-have service for the 20 year olds in Korea. And to put it in context, there are more bloggers on CyWorld in Korea than all other bloggers in the rest of the world today..

What is it? Well, first of all its your mini home page (called minihomepi) where you have much like the rooms in Habbo Hotel, your miniroom and, of course, your digital persona in the form of an avatar, as your minime. The miniroom can be decorated like your home or office, or it could be aspirational of what you’d like your real life to be. You can invite friends to visit your miniroom, where you can exhibit your pictures, blogs, etc. Much like the use of premium SMS to pay for content and services in Habbo Hotel, in CyWorld you buy “acorns” and these form the trading currency in CyWorld.

It gets interesting when we add the blogging part. CyWorld is provided by the internet arm of SK and there is direct mobile blogging opportunity from the mobile arm of SK. The traffic in pictures and blogging posts is enormous, with picture posting and viewing of picture galleries considered now the most addictive part of CyWorld. Mobile blogging (mostly for CyWorld) is the second biggest value-add service in Korea today, ahead of music, behind only gaming revenues, averaging 3.40 USD per user.

Business week heeft er in september ook een artikel over geschreven. 15 mln Koreanen zijn lid, eenderde van de bevolking. In de leeftijdgroep 20-30 bijna 90%! Fascinerende ontwikkeling.......

12 December 2005
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Tomi T Ahonen | Dinsdag 13 December 2005, 19:24

Groetje readers of Brick Meets Byte (I hope that greeting was correctly spelled...). Very nice that you noticed my posting about CyWorld. The readers here at Brick Meets Byte might be intersted not only in our blogsite about Community Power - where Alan Moore and I write daily about trends in community power disrupting business and society - but also in our book of the same name, Communities Dominate Brands, which came out in the Spring of 2005 and is already being translated into four languages (although not Dutch, yet...). You will find many cases and examples of how traditional bricks-and-mortar business is clasing with the digital world, from total disasters like the Kryptonite lock company to remarkable successes from Coca Cola to Boeing (and Philips is there too, not forgetting our Dutch contributions ha-ha) Finally, if you are intersted in discussing specifically the future of mobile telecoms, then please join us at the free discussion board sponsored by Oxford University. The address for Forum Oxford is as simple as you can imagine: http://www.forumoxford.com and for your first time registration you will need an "Enrollment key" which is the word forumoxford That is asked only once, and after that you can participate in the free discussion board forever. We have all the leading mobile telecoms authors there already, such as Paul Golding, Mark Curtis, Ajit Jaokar, Alan Moore and myself of course as well as most of the leading mobile telecoms bloggers etc. Join us there if you'd like to understand how services and applications - like CyWorld, OhMyNews, Habbo Hotel, blogging etc will live and thrive on mobile phones... Danky Vell (spelling? thank you..) Tomi Ahonen :-)