just read an article about the recent seminar by justin hall on his concept of “passively multi-play online games.” interesting concept.

Justin has fun online, works online, studies and loves and plays online — and on his phone and his Playstation. Why can’t the whole thing be a game — a social game and a knowledge game? … all calls the notion “Passively Multiplayer Online Games,” and describes it as ” a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online. Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.”
– original post here

when i had a very quick glance at his ideas, i thought we were talking about the same thing. the crucial role of the element of “play” in our lives, amplified particularly by network technologies. we’re living in the “entiretainment” age.

then i had a better read of it and realised that we were actually talking about the opposite ideas within the framework of network play. we’ve got pretty much the same elements of investigation - play, network, mobile etc - but in the simplest sense, he’s looking at ludus while i’m looking at paidia, the opposite end of the continuum (as suggested by caillois) by means of measuring your passive (turned into active) participation - some people might disagree with this idea since strictly speaking, measuring alone wouldn’t make a paidic experience into a ludic one; i suppose here i’m thinking more in lines of (sub)conscious/unconscious accordance to rules. i consider “games” as rule-binding therefore ludic, and subcategorical to the concept of “play”) - i don’t know if i want to be “in game” all the time. the idea just doesn’t appeal to me. i believe in play but i’m not sure if i believe in games.

anyway, it was fascinating to see “the other side” of what i’m trying to do within what “we’re trying to do.”

a while ago, i read some articles about google’s emerging relationship with korea. i didn’t archive them anwhere - even on my del.icio.us, which would’ve been so easy and a smart thing to do - so i will need to dig them up again, but here’s one of the articles i read then:

Google recently announced that it would invest at least $10 million on an R&D center in Seoul, Korea, reports the Korea Herald, and hire 130-150 researchers. Alan Eustace, Google senior VP for engineering, told the Korea Times that they want to recruit local computer scientists to “further develop innovative search technologies for Korean users and users around the world.”
– Google, Youtube, and Korean Connections @ GigaOm here

google’s share in the competitive search engine market in korea is only 5%. that’s pretty embarrasing for a company that’s managed to turn its name into a verb. you could never replace google in this sentence “just google it or something” with a different search engine name. all the other search engines fall into the second part of the sentence: “or something”

koreanclick reports that unique search referrals in korea are mostly by naver (appx 80%), followed by daum (48%) and yahoo!korea (32%). google’s only at 10.8%. a recent report also shows that to the question “what’s the site that first comes to your mind when you hear the term ’search engine (검색사이트 gumsek saitu)’?,” 59.4% said naver, 10.5% daum, and 7.3% yahoo. In terms of shopping sites, auction was found to be no 1 at 26.3%, followed by gmarket (18.6%), interpark (4.7%), and d&shop (4.2%). you can read the original article here (in korean). ebay bought auction in 2001, but they didn’t change the name; “ebay” is not mentioned anywhere but right on the bottom, where people wouldn’t really scroll down to see. but when i typed in “www.ebay.co.kr” i was taken to auction.

as with the global UCC boom, korean portals are pretty much in the same trend, but i’ve noticed that the korean ones have been doing that for quite a while now. and one of the most interesting things i’ve noticed about naver is that it gained popularity through its “naver knowledge search (네이버 지식검색 naver jisik gumsek).” this is a really interesting service, much like a combination of search engine + wikipedia. kind of like google (but naver had started way before google did) but much neater. korean search engines are quite different - i mentioned this after rachel’s presentation at the AoIR7.0’s doctoral colloquium as well, but if you compare how search results are displayed in yahoo (us or australia) and yahoo korea, you can clearly see the differences. yahoo!korea displays things in this categorical order:

1. knowledge (users answer to other users’ questions and gain ponts, too)
2. blogs and message boards
3. yahoo category
4. web results
5. news
6. hub (tag-based search)
7. music
8. videos
9. images
10. shopping

yahoo!korea basically ripped off naver’s knowledge service. well, it is in fact a really useful thing to have, and it’s helped me quite a bit every time i was preparing my trip to japan (but some people simply want to know things like “which instant noodle is hotter?”). of course i also used message boards in my daum cafes (clubs), and daum portal has recenly incorporated cafe message board search as well, which has boosted their lagging popularity. people seem to care about what other “normal people” or “netizens” have to say about thier subjects of curiousity.

anyway, back to google, as the first mentioned article says, korea’s not all that attractive in terms of market size. it’s a small country. but there are a lot of r&d centres over there, it’s pretty ridiculous - there seem to be a lot of magazine and journal articles on this topic anyway, so you can “(please insert your favourite search engine’s name here)” it, if you like - there’s ibm, microsoft, sun, hp, siemens, and google, just to name a few.
the korean government’s agenda to turn korea into the R&D Hub of North East Asia seems to have worked. why korea for r&d? here are some reasons:

1. strategic location
   (between two largest economies of the world, china and japan)
2. cultural proximity
   (to other asian countries: traditional and contemporary. the korean wave phenomenon has hit the whole region and beyond, from japan to uzbekistan)
3. brains, or qualifications
   (oecd’s report, education at a glance 2005, reports that tertiary education attainment rate of koreans between 25-34 is 47%, and the country is one of the highest performing in student performance in problem solving)
4. supportive environment
   (the government wants you there and will offer you subsidies and tax benefits)
5. nice infrastructure
   (transport-wise and more importantly, the broadband. if you want to see the future of broadband, or the future broadband lifestyle, go to korea)
6. sustainability
   (labour’s still cheapter than first-world countries, and cities are becoming more livable for creative class - foreign and local alike)

it all sounds lovely and beneficial for everyone. but i’m also hearing (or reading, more like) a lot of concerned voices coming from korea. they’re saying that those r&d centres are not contributing much to developing korean r&d sector. some main reasons behind this opinion include:

1. most centres function independently to the existing r&d sources in korea; in other words, there’s not much interaction between the KOREAN education and r&d sectors and the foreign-owned.
2. most workers at those centres are actually koreans; it’s just the same r&d power repackaged, rather than dynamic interactions amongst different multi-national sources.
3. and lastly, it appears as though korea is used as a testbed (for its techno-social and geographical advantages) and “development,” rather than “research” centre. after all, r&d includes two aspects: research and development. in the cyclical process of r&d, the egg comes first; from there chicks are “developed” into hens who can lay more super eggs later.

so i’m not quite sure what google wants from korea, other than looking at what’s going with contents and users in this exotic world built upon broadband. i hope that korea continues to shine technologically and culturally, and people - rich and poor - get to benefit from all that’s happening and is going to happen. korea will have to be careful so that they don’t get sucked into “the system” and spat out before they realise that they’ve lost most, if not all, of their eggs. my humble suggestion is that korea should watch out for their “palipali” tendencies - getting things done in a rushed/hurried manner. this charactersitic is seen in every facet of korean society, and has contributed to some amazing phenomena and developments; but after all, you can’t break the egg and pull the chick (or chicken, even) out, or sell off your farm for a quick gain before the eggs hatch (well, you can, but it’ll be a shame). can i just point out that i really hate using metaphors… well, i did it anyway just for a change.

here’s a new taste from orange called pikeo.

it’s only a beta version and available on the invitation-only basis at the moment, and the orange-pikeo association is not apparent anywhere - maybe it’s a whole metaphorical approach? after all, there’s no orange in orange pekoe tea… i’m not sure.

pikeo is a picture-sharing platform like flickr, but with a lot of mash-up features. i haven’t been invited (feeling pretty virtually unpopular at the moment for this reason) so i don’t know exactly what features they are and how they work, but from screens shots and breif descriptions, it seems to incorporate things like geoTagging and mobie integration (well, it’s orange who’s behind this thing anyway) - it looks like the user can enter three basic tags: WHO/WHAT/Where is it?

here’s some info from the site:

Pikeo is a beta product from France Telecom Research and Development LLC in South San Francisco and is not a “certified” France Telecom product. What does this mean in normal language? It means that:

• Bugs are possible. Maybe even inevitable. Like nasal hair.
• We still have a long way to go before everything runs perfectly, but please let us know when (gulp) things go wrong - at support@Pikeo.com.
• There is limited customer support right now. But it’s nice and friendly limited support. You can reach us at: support@Pikeo.com - and we’ll do our best to sort you out.
• We think that pictures tell better stories when you can give people some idea of where they were taken. Pikeo lets you look at your pictures along with a map showing ‘the scenes of your crimes’.
• Pikeo also helps you organise your pictures in smart albums based on ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘who’ information (called ‘tags’). You can decide which of your pictures you want to share with your family, friends and everyone else, and which ones you want no one to see. Ever, ever.
• Best of all, you’ll be in full control of your community via our innovative ‘Contacts’ browsing tool – which lets you keep the riff-raff out (unless your family and friends are riff-raff. That’s for you to decide…).

i’m not sure how successful this is going to be. the timing is crucial when it comes to online business, and i wonder how many people will be willing to go through the painfully arduous migration process frm flickr to this - or any other new platform in that matter. looking at all the new things popping up like wild flowers in the backyard of my old place, i can’t help but be amazed at the clever achievement of SK Telecom in scoring cyworld in 2003. perfect timing - it introduced the concept of blogging to korea (cyworld was first launched in 1999), it combined main features of all these huge then yet-to-be-seen services like myspace and flickr, while fitting perfectly into the techno-social environment of south korea. although i do doubt its success in US (mainly because of the timing of its introduction), i still think it’s a fantastic business model, and i’m still very much fascinated by it on many different levels (apart from the fact that it doesn’t work in safari and only kind-of in firefox).

anyway, it’d be interesting to see how pikeo does globally. and something completely irrelevant - there’s also a japanese band called orange pekoe. they’ve got some lovely, sometimes boring, easy-to-listen-to tunes.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government opened “Seoul Oasis,” a portal Web site (www.seouloasis.net) that allows citizens of Seoul to freely exchange their ideas and suggestions on municipal policies.
full story here

seoul’s been going through some huge changes in many ways - environmentally, culturally, and now socially, it seems. i’d be really interested to see how this thing goes. it kind of reminds me of “shinmoongo,” introduced by King Taejong during Chosun dynasty, which was basically a drum that a commoner could come and hit to directly discuss their grievances with the King if the matter could not be resolved through appropriate processes on a local level/s.
seoul’s very exciting. never liked the city before, but the last time i went - early this year - i was really impressed by all the changes that were going on to make it a better place to live. there are lots of interesting galleries and museums, too. would love to go again soon.

Japanese salarymen looking for a quick shape up can now get themselves jazzed up in a jiffy thanks to a nifty new speed grooming service, according to Sunday Mainichi
full story @ mainichi daily

so the basic story is this: a company called menza has set up some booths around central tokyo for japanese sarariman (salary men). kuse-oyaji (stinky old man) uses his mobile to access menza’s website to locate the booth closest to his current location, and there he gets checked up on various things from creases on his suit to whether his’s got an adequately “smiling face” or not…

// this is my visual interpretation of what it’d be like to be in a menza booth… but unfortunately for me, i’ll never find out… until they open “womenza” :(

my favourite part is this:

Menza.jp employees all line up to send off customers, who can choose whether their farewell will be given in the form of a bow, a wave goodbye or high fives.

gotta love the flexibility in things ;)

microsoft’s latest os, vista, was previewed, or rather was “reborn” as a frumpy woman or fowl in latvia not long ago. i don’t know if microsoft’s choosing latvia was intentional or not, but i couldn’t stop laughing at this paragraph in this enquirer article:

Microsoft Latvia is trying to get around the problem by playing up Vista’s positive aspects and the more poetic, international definition of the name. A spokesVole said that when Latvians learn of the technical opportunities the system offers, they will pay more attention to its advantages, not its name.

apparently “vista” means fowl/chicken or frumpy woman in latvian. perhaps this is ms’s marketing strategy - obviously people are talking and laughing about this. i fell in love with macs once, broke up, and once again, i’m really enjoying my macbook’s company. we’ll see how vista goes - looks ok, but it may actually be really dodgy like xp… i hope it’s good; i’d love to have the dual booting thing going on my macbook.