naver - nei buh - neighbour. yes? no?
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?
