Web users in one of the world’s most-wired countries seldom “Google” anything. They “Naver” it

… When NHN, an online gaming company, set up the search portal in 1999, the site looked like a grocery store where most of the shelves were empty. Like Google, Naver found there simply was not enough Korean text in cyberspace to make a Korean search engine a viable business.

“So we began creating Korean-language text,” said Lee Kyung Ryul, an NHN spokesman. “At Google, users basically look for data that already exists on the Internet. In South Korea, if you want to be a search engine, you have to create your own database.”

– NY Times, July 2007(original post here)

this beloved nei-buh (we don’t have anything close to the v or r-sound in korean)’s moving out, it seems.

joins.com reports naver lovers are becoming increasingly not so fond of the idea ‘love thy naver’ and now migrating to other portal sites (notably daum) - and they have good reasons for it, too. naver has been implementing strange restrictions on user partipation, especially political ones: to start with, mid this year, users found that they were no longer able to leave comments on individual political news items. instead, they were able to participate in the general politics discussion boards. excuse me? yes, precisely.

there is a major reason behind this change, apprently: the upcoming presidential election. naver feared its possible involvement in fierce political debates and how they could maintain ‘fairness’ in discussions and promotions. excuse me? yes, precisely… for the second time.

the following is a monthly comparison of news hits between naver (grey) and daum (black) and changes occurred on naver:

May 19: redesign of new site
Jun 22: national eleciton commision announced banning on supporting/criticising specific parties/candidates online (wha-?)
Sep 10: no comments on individual politics news item
Oct 28: introduction of the ‘comments hiding’ function

what’s really shocking is the national election commission’s (nec) approach. read this global voices article (Korea: Role of the National Election Commission for the Coming Presidential Election) for more info. basically if you wanted to post anything like what’s happening on youtube (most obviously example’s hilary vs. obama videos), you’d have to be prepared to face one year sentence or a fine up to 200 million korean won. how is this even possible? do they even understand the basic concept of democracy? do they understand what this thing called internet is all about? since they’re also from Korea, the most connected nation in the world, i thought they would have at least a little bit of idea. and how wrong was i? am i the only wrong one here?

naver’s still the top visitor-magnet in korea. it’s closely followed by daum, and cyworld and nate are 3rd and 4th respectively, which means, if you combine these two (cyworld is a sub-division of nate), they would actually be the no.1. i’ve been talking about cyworld and nate (especially jishik-in service: can be translated as knowledge-in or person with knowledge) with my research participants, and it seems nate talk is gaining popularity. this is where you could talk about practically anything - e.g. problems with their current romantic situations, suggestions for good restaurants in a particular suburbs, etc. anything. it promotes comments, and my research participants were enthusiastic about reading the comments. they can be very humorous, and users can vote for the best comments, too.

naver’s knowledge-in service was absolutely brilliant. yahoo and daum made replicas, not only within korea but also on other yahoo! international sites. it seems pretty obvious that naver’s making a big mistake. yes, there’s political pressure, but portals also have the responsibility to provide a safe venue for people to communicate their ideas, considering portals mean nothing without voluntarily participating individuals. yes, for pragmatic reasons, portals need their own databases to survive here in korea where people speak korean, not english. this may present better opportunities for the portals to actually control what’s stored in those databases. but who stocked the empty shelves? who changed the storage space into interactive knowledge space?

naver has recently announced that they would work with and in support for the association of korean independent film and video. great. well done to you there. but i’m confused now. and this move makes me question your motives. i am not forgetting that postmodern society does not exist without capitalism. if users sense foolish tyranny (whether secretely or consipicuously) by the portal that they used to ‘live in’ without proper justification that is understandable within the current techno-social context, they will abandon the place. they may return sometime as long as their user information does not expire, but the domain of portal is diverse, competitive, and unpredictable.

naver relied heavily on people. right from the beginning, it not only saw what they could do, but it was basically built upon them. abandoning them like this is simply wrong. no excuse will do. let us love our neighbours. talking together would be a good first step, don’t you think?

i’m going to the mp3 experiment in seoul this weekend.

one of the improv everywhere events - this time in seoul.

come along if you’re around!

when: 9pm, sat, nov 17, 2007

where: @ the slide in hongdae park

how much: free :D

see you there. should be A LOT of FUN

there have been two ‘mega-fast’ mobiles phones released in korea in the past couple of months: LG’s storm phone (LG-SH150) and samsung’s ufo phone (SCH-W300). equipped with an amazing 7.2 Mbps hsdpa data transfer speed, these new 3g phones only takes about 4.5 seconds to download a full audio track (assuming it’s about 4MB in size). nifty.

original image from here

i’ve been using the storm phone, and been a happy user. listening to ringtone and coloring samples has never been frustrating – only takes one second – and there’s always a decent selection of news on the nate page (mobile portal for SK) that it actually reduces my daily online news reading time on a pc.

considering the solid reputation of samsung compared to that of lg in the domain of mobile phone production, i would’ve definitely gone for the ufo phone had it not been so expensive: the phone itself cost me only about 100 australian dollars when i got it one and a half months ago (with gov. subsidies). ufo wanted to take a bit, well, a lot, more from my financial planet – costing four to five times as much.

storm, released on august 23, has not taken the koreans by its name: only 70000 sold so far.

ufo, released on september 3, not even close: 14000.

according to a yahoo!korea article (where the figures came from), the disappointing figures are mainly because of the network infrastructure that is still in need of upgrading to better support.

i assume that’s partly true, although i have never disappointed with my phone’s performance in terms of the content and the speed that both the phone and the network provides – this includes those times when i upload large photos (storm takes 2MP images, 1600×1200) and switching on a S-DMB channel, which takes about 5-10 seconds.

another reason, i think, concerns not the technological layer of infrastructure but the socio-cultural and financial ones. my research data so far show that young people (aged 18-24, whom i call trans-youths) here are not so crazy about going online with the phone. most of my participants only make voice calls, sms, play games (sometimes with friends via bluetooth), and nothing much else. they are not interested because it costs money, and they don’t really see the point. they can go online quick and easy (… and very high in bandwidth of course) pretty much any time and anywhere for free and/or very cheaply. i had the same findings in my last research about cyworld in which users were found unwilling to use mobile cyworld.

furthermore, ringtones and coloring services are a great online-music business platform and the codec’s improving quite a lot to ensure good quality audio. however, again to my surprise, the participants are not so interested. cyworld background music is a different story though, for various reasons.

younger people (teenagers), however, present a different story. they are a lot more interested in these things, and could probably afford to buy the storm phone at least (their parents would probably be ok with paying $100). but look at the design of it. would it appeal to teenagers? hardly.

along with technological improvements (better network infrastructure to support high bandwidth content transfer) there really needs to be more considerations to the design of mobile experience (which should also take great account of socio-cultural contexts in which the experience occurs). i’m hoping to find out more about this in my research, and share more solid ideas pretty soon – yes, the end of my candidature is looming … very quickly like the beautiful foliage falling all round here.