Channy’s Blog

I was at Future of Web Apps Conference in the last week, Miami Beach. It gave the chance to hear various technical workshops and latest web application technologies and examples from famous startups such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Pownce and WorePress. It was very good time for me.

Also I attended BarCamp Miami and presented “Why not Web 2.0 in Korea?” that explains no boom-up status of Web 2.0 in Korea and why you check out Korea continually.

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Some people already knows Naver and Cyworld, but there is no famous successful startups although Korea has the highest broadband network and most wired people. You can see my presentation in slideshare.net too.

On Mix 08 keynote stage, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked about the latest Microsoft issues with Guy Kawasaki. Guy asked sixteen questions to Steve. After asking to shout “web” developers from one guy, Steve Ballmer screamed three times of “web developers”.

Guy’s questions for Steve Ballmer

1. Huge footprint on the consumer Web - what are you doing with it? Yahoo?
2. How will you win against Google?
3. Why are you still at Microsoft after all these years? Bill’s called it a day…
4. Sliverlight downloads progress?
5. Advertising?
6. What’s the current status with the EU?
7. What does the post-Bill Gates MS look like?
8. MS in too many businesses - have you lost focus?
9. Corp agility. Is MS the new IBM?
10. What is your social networking strategy?
11. What is Facebook really work?
12. Are you warried that Apple’s gaining share?
13. Next version of Windows underwheliming?
14. IE vs. Firefoix?
15. Live strategy - what is it?
16. Mobile. What’s MS’s iPhone?

You can see answers of Cnet and BetaNews’s live article.

update. Baller gives an action for Macbook Air.

Kawasaki pointed out that most people don’t have a choice and get it when they buy a PC. Ballmer then reached and grabbed Kawasaki’s MacBook Air out of an envelope. “Is this running Vista?” he asked. Kawasaki said that it wasn’t. The two then debated the merits of the machine.

“Don’t you want a machine this light?” Kawasaki asked, with Ballmer saying his Toshiba laptop weighs less. “That thing is missing half the features,” Ballmer said, referring to the MacBook. “Where’s the DVD drive?”

IE8 was hot issue. There is first demonstration for IE8 in Mix08 with new things eight.

1. CSS 2.1: Web Standards

2. CSS Certification: passing Acid 2 Test

3. Performance : JavaScript

4. HTML 5 : Ajax navigation, offline supporting.

5. Developer Tools: HTML, CSS, Script debugging

6. Activities : Contextual search and web utility e.g Ebay on IE8

7. WebSlices - clipping web contents with simple makrup.

8. IE8 beta 1 is now rock! IE8 download after keynote.

I’m in front of keynote stage of Mix08. Enjoy song! In 10 minutes, you can enjoy keynote in streaming. Have a interesting times!

How about check about Flickr photos and blog posts.

I’m at Lift Conference in Geneva. Yesterday Gen Kanai gave a good speech about open source activities in Asia. He introduced Mozilla’s asian activities including China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. And he explained why Asian contributions is low rather than usages. You can see Gen’s speech via as following steaming video.

In addition, I will explain more things of Korean situation . Historically open source is changed from individual (mid 1990), late 1990 big community such as KLDP, mid 2000 by bloggers, small communities. In late 2000, it will be open source business, strong communities and full time open source developers!

Government has supported Open Source since 2003, but it’s ridiculous thing of supporting regional linux OS, Asianux. Recently it’s hopeful to increase individual developers such as Linux, Apache, BID and Mozilla.
Gen indicated cultural and language barriers is very high, so some of code committers such as Mozilla, Apache, Gnome and KDE made a Korean public bugzilla system to teach how to make a bug, committing patches and communications with foreign contributors. And I finished Open Source Education for CE students in Cheju National University in last year.

Especially Korean Web Portals want more Open Source because they changed open source based service platform (LAM+Open Soruce Java). Daum is supporting OSS community in http://oss.daum.net and offer public FTP archive in http://ftp.daum.net. The NHN recruited Kwon, Soon Sun, a leader of the largest OSS user community KLDP.org as a open source evangelist.

Many companies, developers and students are interested in open source contribution more and more.

Note: most of links in this article are korean sites.

It’s almost the end of 2007 that there were many activities in Mozilla Korean Community. In this year Korean community was grown up by voluntary participators. Firstly, many local communities was made by them, e.g. content and marketing community and Mozilla Developer Center(MDC) korean community and add-ons korean community as well official community.

Especially the community for MDC and add-ons was very active and there were many local contents in MDC Korean and Korean add-ons sites and official Add-ons site. The number of official community members was 3650 on Dec. 31th and over 100 active members registered in each sub communities.

Various promotional activities were offered in this year. Blogs related to Firefox, Firefox inside, Fox@home and Firefox blog cafe gave a good information to general users. According to Allblog, the famous Korean blog search engine, there were over 14,000 blog articles tagged “Firefox” since March 2007. Although bloggers in Allblog is very technical experts rather than ordinary people, it’s very hopeful signal to grow market share in here.

Personally I had many chances to speak Mozilla’s project and open web strategy in Future Web Forum(en) on March, JCO Open Source Conference(en) on October and various IT companies, Samsung and LG Electronics about Mozilla technical platform.

Especially Mozilla’s new mission statement for open web is very helpful to us. As you know, Gen indicated Korean “closed web” situation via his good article, the cost of monoculture(en) in early this year. Many social costs were paid by Active X based Korean intranet systems by changes of XP service pack 2 and Windows Vista(en). Most of Korean Firefox users suffered web surfing of most of local sites and they must launch Internet Explorer or use IETab extensions in a separate way. (Of course, there has no way in Mac and Linux OS users. They have been warriors in forefront for closed web.)

As a result, there were many many news(en) written by Gen including establishing open web’s legal reaction(en). Many mozilla guys were interested in Korean situation including Asa, Gen, Paul and John. I felt that Mozilla DevDay(en) in Boston on March. There was a episode. Seth recommended standards promotion, so I brought web standards posters over 30 pieces from boston and gave them to requesters with promotion plans.

In this year, many korean web sites became more standardized and XHTML/CSS skills did universal for web developers. Personally I translated DOM Scripting(en) of Jeremy Keith into Korean and published technical report(en) for web standards with CJK’s experts. There were over five books related web standards and over ten books about Ajax skill. Rich web techniques influenced Korean web developers. They were aware of needs of structured separation for user experience between technical platforms and web. Although Microsoft and Adobe’s new technology seems to be popular in here, the independence of platforms will be accelerated in next year.

At last, on Novermber, Korean E-government site started to support Firefox and Safari for using public certificate only based on Active X controls. And a payment gateway introduced open payment, All browser payment service for a transaction of credit card. (In Korea, you need to install Active X control by credit card companies to buy something via online.) In next year, many bank and shopping sites will support Firefox for secure transactions by these efforts.

On December 5th, our community gave a annual party. Over 40 users were participated and they expressed own feelings about Firefox (referring to Gen(en) and John’s(en) article.)

I was very impression there were general users as like middle school student. It means the mass of people started to use Firefox as well only IT experts. In fact, I minded active marketing for years to general users because there are many mine field in Korean web sites to surf. They easily uninstall Firefox and tend to never install software with bad experiences. But I decided to aggressive community marketing in next year after party.

In next year, MoKo will preserve our efforts for open web environment and try to increase Firefox users over 2% in Korea. (estimated 0.5% right now.) For that, we’ll make community build supported by Naver and Daum with good theme and useful extensions as like IE Tab including Korean whitelist. And we plans many community based marketing promotions and events in one half year related to Mozilla’s 10 anniversary.

Happy New Year and Force and Firefox with you!

Cyworld is one of very unique social network services in the world. Before Cyworld, there were a success case, ILoveSchool based on networking school alumni in 1999. So trying of new startup for SNS has been very rare.

Recently there are new startup services for SNS such as LinkNow.kr, Hutory.net and People2.co.kr. I reviewed these in detail, but I couldn’t find unique things compared with abroad SNS services.

The Web 2.0 trend makes a duplication of ideas and innovations too such as a example of Germany. Korea is not except, Me2day and PlayTalk was on debate who copied ideas and concept each other, but they’re also clones of the Twitter style.

Furthermore, I could find similar icons and user interface as if they want to copy them without weight on mind. Linknow is almost clone of early LinkedIn. As one of heavy user of LinkedIn, I’m very inconvenienced for that. Many newspapers remarked its starting because the founder was influential on that area.

Hutory.net is also very similar with Facebook interface. All of collections are shown in one page such as photo, profile, friends, groups and comments simpler than Cyworld. But, it is a clone of Facebook clone in Germany StudiVZ

Someone may say that clone services are rather than no trying. Copying interface and icons is on a charge of the larceny of intellectual property rights.

A Korean famous blogger, Danny Kim started new blog TechnoKimchi to write on digital generation in Asia especially focused on Korea young people enjoyed wired life.

His Korean blog has over 5,000 subscribers and popular to Web 2.0 mania. He studied in Cornell University and worked in Samsung SDS as a system engineer.

Recently he took decisive action to quit his job and swings to full time blogger after his brave journey. He wrote why he starts new blog as followings:

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.

So, that’s why this blog exists.

If you want to know more cultural effects of broadband effect, you can enjoy his fun and good stories there. My blog has very simple topics for Korean web business, but you can read more thing in detail in Web 2.0 Asia or TechnoKimchi.

Even though Google, web search giant conquers all search world, there is exceptional country. In Korea, Naver became David against Goliath. What’s different Naver from Google and How’s different Korea from others?

Naver explained their unique characteristics of its search engine and service evolved by Korean user’s requirement over time. It’s different style with Google and foreign search engine.

They called it as ‘Multiple or Integrated Search‘ that shows results by information collections such as own-made databases and web documents together whereas global search engines are based on only web documents.

Of course, other search engine have tried how to give good results by collections such as Yahoo! Alpha, Ask X, Microsoft Imagine Live, even Google’s own Searchmash.

Retuning to Naver, it started a method of Integrated Search in 7 years ago. In 1999, the number of web sites written in korean was under 50,000. It’s very different environment compared with English web sites.

There were search engines but weren’t web sites to be indexed. So Naver decided to avoid crawling based search results and utilize own-made databases cooperated with contents providers with fee such as music, movie, news and book.

Naver calls each one as a collection. If an user query artist name, it shows a result of each collection from artist database as like All Music Guide, music news, blog articles and web results. Each collections were shown in equal divisions with 3 to 4 items in the search result page.

Naver has various collections to find proper results per each search keyword. A number of them may over 30 such as Q&A(Knowledge In), forums (aka Cafe), blogs, image, news, dictionary, video, music, book and shopping etc.

Multiple Ranking Model
Generally search results depend on search modeling and ranking method calculated by mathematical and experienced formula. Google has own page ranking model referring to linking in web page. But, Naver has many collections and their complicated ranking model.

Firstly Naver has the collection ranking model that change the exposure sequence of collections by user’s action per each keyword. It was decided where users who input a same keyword found information in as like clicking a link and page back actions.

For example, if you query for “Summer Time”, because users tend to find the definition and background of “Summer Time”, collections of dictionary and Q&A ranks high. In case of “Britney Spears”, collections of music, shopping and news does high in search results.

Also each collection has own ranking model itself, for instance, the latest is important weight in news collection as well matching and frequency in news sources. In Q&A collection, the credibility of answerers is the ranking factor rather than others. So each collection assigns priority and show items in order by an individual ranking model.

As well it avoids duplicated results by controlling between collection ranking model. It results that an user can find proper items not to be overlapped in each collection. If the similar ranking model is applied in each collection, there will be duplicated results in them.

It is possible that over 16 million users visit Naver’s search and queries 100 millions in every day - i.e. 1,172 query per second in July, 2007. So Naver can find Korean’s general trends why they input that keyword. It means they offer perfect results for Korean. In the other hands, it reflects that Korean has rare diversity and unique habits in life patterns.

I think it’s a result of broadband effect too. People watch popular TV drama and news in everyday and read newspaper and are interested in entertainment gossips. It means Internet is not tools for finding information, but life tools to talk with others in broadband environment. Nowadays many Koreans watch TV program and often query search keyword such as actor’s name, program issues from TV program at the same time.

Basically I think it will be same in abroad environment even though Google’s ranking model is now popular rather than Naver’s. Also most of foreign competitors want to resemble Naver’s success. It depends how many broadband users utilizes search services as life tools.

The Korean first meta-blog site, BlogKorea.org will be relaunched braking a gap of two years in July 17, 2007. The meta-blog site means news style-blog gateway based on blogger’s subscription and crawling of their RSS feeds. It started in 2003 and most of early bloggers registered BlogKorea.org. Its outset is concerned by many blogger fans who miss old friend.

In 2004, the number of registered bloggers is over 3000 and there were the latest new article by unique bloggers. It was different from foreign blog search engine such as Technorati or IceRocket. Even though all of them are based on subscription of RSS feeds, BlogKorea didn’t crawl bloger’s site by search bots and offered the latest and highest recommended articles as like Digg.com or NewsVine.

But, it’s just volunteer-based services and there was not professional support. In result, it lost all article saved in database of unexpected outage. After a few days, Allblog.net was coincidentally opened with similar interface of BlogKorea. Allblog had new interface and good function rather than BlogKorea. So many of bloggers moved to Allblog. At last, BlogKore was little more than a name. Yes, it’s sad story.

The brand of BlogKorea was sold to OhMyNews, the famous online citizenship news site in January 2007. But there was no good action and result, so it was sold to MediaU again. Jisun Lee, CEO of MediaU announced the plan of relaunching of BlogKorea in June.

She has various background from news reporter to PR manager, finally studied in US and examined changes of new Internet marketing. Especially blogging culture was attractive to her. MediaU announced to prepare blog advertisement, consulting of enterprise marketing based on blogkorea.org in launching party.

Early bloggers already were good at using Allblog. Even if they delighted to relaunch it, I cannot commit myself whether BlogKorea gains blogger’s attention or not.

Daum launched Open ID Beta service to provide Open ID account to its users in July 13th, 2007. Daum has over 56 million Hanmail accounts. Everyday most of Korean over 7 million people logged in Daum to read their email and news articles.

So it is very big news to Open ID ecosystem in the world. Daum gives a type of http://openid.daum.net/myid URL format as well ones blog URL such as http://blog.daum.net/myid.

Daum Open ID sites is also secures with EV SSL cetificates.

I introduced various online video sharing sites in last year. Even though Korea was developed in broadband, there were mostly payable VOD and web casting sites in Korea.

The video sharing service needed high cost of network bandwidth and server systems including encoding and distribution. So most of service providers mind to enter this market. After the success of YouTube, many of service providers started to enter this area such as portal sites.

Now there are two separating providers: one is the video section service of portal sites and the other is independent service providers. The former is Daum TVPot, Naver Play, Yahoo! Yami (now shut-down), Cyworld Video and Freechal Q. The latter includes Pandora.tv, Mncast, Mgoon, Dedeo, UCCC and TagStory.

In US market, Youtube is almost exclusive and Myspace, Google and Yahoo! Video were followed. But, Korean market is very competitive between portal and independent sites.

As following is the monthly unique visitor’s trend for video sites researched by KoreanClick on June, 2007 via Daum Advertising Focus Blog. You can know the strong entrance of portal sites after January in this year. But, Pandora.tv(845M) occupies still the highest market share, and Daum TVPot(841M) is followed. And Mncast, Naver Play, Mgoon, Freechal Q, DioDeo, Cyworld Video, UCCC.

Where is the YouTube here? According to Rankey.com’s research in June, YouTube has only 3% market share except portal sites. (Pandora.tv 33%, Mncast 14%, Mgoon 11%). It proved Korea is the grave of famous global web sites.

Some of Korean bloggers reported screenshots of search result bucket test Google Korea. Especially it is very similiar with search results of local competitors such as Naver and Daum. It was more interesting because Google was changed new front-page layout for Korean different with other languages.

Recently Google unveiled new search results user interface called Universal Search that unify and blend search results across their collection such as web search, news, blogs, images and videos, etc. It means Google divided details properties from mass index of web pages and it will be important to show proper collections by query.

But, this bucket test is more advanced to be suitable for Korean’s search viewpoint. It has four collection box such as web results, image, news and blog per a query. It also added link of “more results” in each section and remove typical number navigation in below.

Does Google really change its universal interface to win Korean market? Please check out full screenshot.

Who does search the keyword of “Web 2.0″ in the world? Surprisingly it was Korean according to a result of Google Trends in 2006. Of course, South Korea and Seoul were also highly ranked in this period.

But, I thought it was bias caused by the result of rare ordinary people. (Google is just under 2% market share in here- most of technical guys only have used Google. In result, Google Trends might fix this bias after issuing of this fact.

Recently I reviewed search trends of “Web 2.0″, more surprisingly it was Taiwan and India. In recent period in 2006~2007, Singapore and Japan was included.

In case of “Web 2.0 vs . Web2.0” with no space, Japan is very high in the world.

As following are Taiwan, South Korea, China and India. Most of Asian don’t use no space-word language, so they tend to write no space among words.

Anyway Asian people have been interested in Web 2.0 rather than other continent even though there are some bias of big population and low market share with technically major users. How about “Web 3.0″? It’s very similar result with “Web 2.0″.

How about your thought?

It’s one of episodes in Seoul Digital Forum. I think SDF was very expensive conference as much as Web 2.0 Summit, but it was based on free invitation only. Chris Anderson’s speech was impressed me too, in fact I met him and heard his long tail speech in Ebay Developer Conference in last year.

But this speech offered very good insights in media area specially old media and advertisement market. You can watch a clip of this speech via Youtube

In speech, I was very impressed on marketing strategy of Wired.com via 1) Reach (Generate traffic by optimizing for use of search, 3rd party linking and feeds 2) Reader experience (Keep traffic) without advertisement, 3) Selling subscriptions (gathering qualified customers) and 4) Selling advertisement to only subscribers.

His point is very important to make traffic by linking strategy with a unit of each story or page and offers convenient reading experiences. Once one became royalty customer, in that time you would offer advertisement to them, so you get very high effect of advertisement.

I had very similar experience in Feedburner Advertisement Network. A number of subscribers to my Korean blog feed is almost 5,000 people. From March to June, the CTR is average over 10%.

It means effect of subscription-based advertisement is higher than web page advertisement such as Google AdSense. Chis’s point is very important to old media web sites and company such as newspapers and magazines.