'Singapore'에 해당되는 글 7건
- 2008/09/19 Wikis in the Asian market? Check out Springnote.com!
- 2007/08/29 Obviously Seoul again! (1)
- 2007/08/27 Kind of taking a break (2)
- 2007/08/21 State of Play V: Regulating Virtual Worlds, and Changes in Education, Connecting East and West (1)
- 2007/08/20 I'm at State of Play V
- 2007/08/17 Heading off to Singapore for State of Play V (1)
- 2007/08/02 What goes around comes around.
2008/09/19 03:04
Wikis in the Asian market? Check out Springnote.com!
2008/09/19 03:04 in basic info
Disclaimer: I've been involved with the global marketing project for Springnote (as I mentioned here), so this post has quite a bit of marketing message in it. :)
As much as blogs and SNSs have been considered the core of Web 2.0, we haven't been diligently discussing the importance and the impact of wikis on the Web world. Think about it. Which one do you think is bigger? Wordpress or Wikipedia? In fact, Wikipedia is now so big that Google decided to create its own in Knol. (Of course, blogging is big and Google wants to do better by buying TNC--or at least I hope so
) As you can see from the chart above, the need for wikis have gone way beyond that for blogs. Quite astonishing, isn't it?
Anyhow, the wiki market has been growing huge in the Asia-Pacific region. The chart tells us that the top queries for wiki are coming from none other than Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Quite astonishing, isn't it?
Springnote has been the lone Asian service in the wiki market, to my knowledge. It has positioned itself as a hybrid of a note-taking application and a wiki. The English version was launched less than a year ago, and it's already been covered by some major media entities, such as LifeHacker, ReadWriteWeb, and Mashable. In fact, I'm the one behind the official Springnote blog; you can probably tell how similar the tones of TechnoKimchi and the Springnote blog are to each other :)
Anyhow, (not because I'm the marketer but), Springnote really is an excellent service.
(click on the picture to see it full size)
As much as blogs and SNSs have been considered the core of Web 2.0, we haven't been diligently discussing the importance and the impact of wikis on the Web world. Think about it. Which one do you think is bigger? Wordpress or Wikipedia? In fact, Wikipedia is now so big that Google decided to create its own in Knol. (Of course, blogging is big and Google wants to do better by buying TNC--or at least I hope so
) As you can see from the chart above, the need for wikis have gone way beyond that for blogs. Quite astonishing, isn't it?Anyhow, the wiki market has been growing huge in the Asia-Pacific region. The chart tells us that the top queries for wiki are coming from none other than Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Quite astonishing, isn't it?
Anyhow, (not because I'm the marketer but), Springnote really is an excellent service.
- It's a FREE Web application, making it accessible from anywhere,
- comes with 2 GB of file storage and unlimited amount of texts
- provides collaborative features by giving edit/view rights to the selected only
- supports great tech stuff, like Open ID Authentication, Open APIs, and XHTML.
How "Excellent" is it? If you guys can remember for a moment that I'm the first known full-time blogger in Korea running a network of blogs, Springnote is basically my CMS (Content Management System). I host many of my attachments and images in Springnote and even write most of my blogs in Springnote and port them to each blog.
Springnote just went through a major upgrade few hours ago, making it even a better serivce. It now comes with a view mode, designed for better content consumption and a better collaborative environment. You can learn more about the upgrade here.
So I strongly urge you guys to check it out. For one, you guys will be supporting a Web 2.0 application from Asia, but for two, you'll probably just purely love the application. (and for three, help me be a better marketer as well. ;) )
As for Japan, Singapore, and Australia beating US, UK, Canada in their search for wikis, maybe some of you guys can give me feedback on how it's happening and if there's any internal market growing in your region.
Like an experienced marketer, I'm gonna wrap this post with this: "This is your Springnote day!". Ok, I admit that was weak, but you get the point. :)
Springnote just went through a major upgrade few hours ago, making it even a better serivce. It now comes with a view mode, designed for better content consumption and a better collaborative environment. You can learn more about the upgrade here.
So I strongly urge you guys to check it out. For one, you guys will be supporting a Web 2.0 application from Asia, but for two, you'll probably just purely love the application. (and for three, help me be a better marketer as well. ;) )
As for Japan, Singapore, and Australia beating US, UK, Canada in their search for wikis, maybe some of you guys can give me feedback on how it's happening and if there's any internal market growing in your region.
Like an experienced marketer, I'm gonna wrap this post with this: "This is your Springnote day!". Ok, I admit that was weak, but you get the point. :)
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Business 2.0 lists up top 12 wired cities that are suited best for business. Obviously, Seoul is one of them. What caught my attention, though, is that 6 out of the 12 cities are Asian cities: Bangalore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. This is what I exactly spotted while over in Singapore. Some serious things are happening over in this half of the world! I'm not sure if all the U.S. cities were dropped out on purpose or the Business 2.0 folks really couldn't find a single U.S. city fit for this.
Some interesting description on Seoul:
Wondering what your cell phone will be like in three years? Head to Seoul, home of electronics giants Samsung and LG and the world's proving grounds for cutting-edge wireless technologies.
Well, I've been writing so much in Korean that I thought maybe taking a 20-min break to write something in English might refresh my hands and thoughts. Ok, back to work!
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Hey, guys, it's been a while since I last wrote up a post here. I'm back in Korea from a wonderful trip to Singapore and still have a great deal of stuff to write about the State of Play Conference. In short, it was so amazing!
Unfortunately, it seems I might have to take a week off or so from this blog :( because I'm trying to finish up a book that's going to be published pretty soon. It's called "MECONOMY (like Me-Economy)". It's about a new economic system that's been emerging from the falling communication and coordination costs thanks to the Internet, an economy in which individuals, not institutions or firms, can now function as the center. It's about an economy where I AM the center, thus MEconomy. By the way, it's being written in Korean.
So, I'll be back soon, but please, keep loving this blog :)
If you want to reach me for anything, my email address is
See ya-
Unfortunately, it seems I might have to take a week off or so from this blog :( because I'm trying to finish up a book that's going to be published pretty soon. It's called "MECONOMY (like Me-Economy)". It's about a new economic system that's been emerging from the falling communication and coordination costs thanks to the Internet, an economy in which individuals, not institutions or firms, can now function as the center. It's about an economy where I AM the center, thus MEconomy. By the way, it's being written in Korean.
So, I'll be back soon, but please, keep loving this blog :)
If you want to reach me for anything, my email address is
See ya-
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2007/08/21 01:40
State of Play V: Regulating Virtual Worlds, and Changes in Education, Connecting East and West
2007/08/21 01:40 in basic info
I wasn't able to write too much after the first session. So, rather I'm going to try to put down the summaries of the last 3 sessions I had today.
Regulating Virtual Worlds
Education, Kids, and Teens in Virtual Worlds
Currently the real world education system is designed for a world back in 1950's. Kids are growing up enormously influenced by the digital technology. They are a lot more participatory also. The social and economic scenes are changing faster than ever due to the Internet. Unfortunately, none of this is reflected in the current one-way-teaching and text-based education system. For us to be able to adopt the opportunities given by virtual worlds and other technologies, we need a completely new mindset.
However, not everything can be learned in virtual worlds, obviously. It's our job to figure what virtual worlds can offer in this space. It seems at the moment that virtual worlds are good providing an environment in which people can come together to collaborate to solve certain problems, rather than learning specific skill sets.
Connecting East and West
The session covered various topics ranging from the two different purposes of playing games in Lineage and Second Life, gold-farming, index for measuring the east/west-ness and etc. I really enjoyed the session while listening on the side most of the time. We definitely need to take a more analytical approach to crossing the gap. While there are fundamental differences between the two which will never get any closer than they are right now, there are also a growing number of commonalities among the two that something could be done for further development. The most important point of the session, I guess, was acknkowledging the value of the differences and how the differences indeed enrich our virtual world experiences.
- - -
Just like every time I attend a conference, I really enjoyed meeting new people and having conversations with them. It's simply because you get to learn so much by doing so. For me, this is a completely new experience: the first time being in Singapore and first time being immersed in the virtual worlds talk.
I'm very excited for tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to bring even more interesting stuff to you all.
Regulating Virtual Worlds
Legal experts explore how controversies related to intellectual property, real-money transfer, gaming as political speech, time-limit addiction laws and the policing of Internet cafes play out throughout the region. They will also draw our attention to culturally variable assumptions that underpin analytical approaches to these issues.Much of the panel discussion revolved around whether it's better to have communities self-regulate or have external forces to step in. At large, there are three forces at play: 1) community of players regulating themselves, 2) game and virtual world makers deciding what needs to happen within through creating systems certain way, 3) actual regulating bodies like the government. Many factors come into play here. Obviously, it'll be the best if all the players and communities act reasonable enough to reach certain social agreements and norms to control themselves; however, not quite so in reality. That's what makes things complicated. Besides, creating laws and regulations for a world that doesn't really exist is a very difficult task itself. For example, let's say there is a crime in Second Life. What country's law should be applied to that member? Is it for Linden Lab to decide? Or should the U.S. government intervene? What if the player was Korean?
Education, Kids, and Teens in Virtual Worlds
There has been an explosion of interest in the use of virtual worlds in education. This panel will examine what works and what doesn’t work, and will present some ideas for the effective use of online spaces for student learning. It will also ask examine how children and teens interact within virtual worlds, and what this teaches us about building kid-and-teen-friendly environments for learning and playing.This session was very interesting because I've always known there's so much learning, in a non-traditional sense, that could be done through an environment like virtual worlds. People indeed train themselves and learn a great deal in this kind of environment. They set goals for themselves, leadership becomes visible, and they collaborate with each other to solve certain problems. Some of the examples in the session were astonishing--like teaching classes in StarWars Galaxy. Now how much of this could be applied to the real world education?
Currently the real world education system is designed for a world back in 1950's. Kids are growing up enormously influenced by the digital technology. They are a lot more participatory also. The social and economic scenes are changing faster than ever due to the Internet. Unfortunately, none of this is reflected in the current one-way-teaching and text-based education system. For us to be able to adopt the opportunities given by virtual worlds and other technologies, we need a completely new mindset.
However, not everything can be learned in virtual worlds, obviously. It's our job to figure what virtual worlds can offer in this space. It seems at the moment that virtual worlds are good providing an environment in which people can come together to collaborate to solve certain problems, rather than learning specific skill sets.
Connecting East and West
Experts explore variations in playing styles, the influence of game mechanics on cross-cultural cooperation, the challenge of intercultural communication, and outcomes of forced localization. This panel will also explore issues of society, governance and virtual worlds as a vehicle for people-to-people diplomacy.Well, as you know, that's the goal of this blog. I want to let known to the world what's here in Korea and Asia and see if we can make any connections between East and West. I was actually one of the panelists during this session. But, I wasn't invited as an "official" panelist, but rather as a translator to Judge Unggi Yoon, who is a very well-respected member here. He'd explain what the MMORPGs are like in Korea and I'll translate that into English for the audience. But, hey, I was still up on the stage. What an honor! ;)
The session covered various topics ranging from the two different purposes of playing games in Lineage and Second Life, gold-farming, index for measuring the east/west-ness and etc. I really enjoyed the session while listening on the side most of the time. We definitely need to take a more analytical approach to crossing the gap. While there are fundamental differences between the two which will never get any closer than they are right now, there are also a growing number of commonalities among the two that something could be done for further development. The most important point of the session, I guess, was acknkowledging the value of the differences and how the differences indeed enrich our virtual world experiences.
- - -
Just like every time I attend a conference, I really enjoyed meeting new people and having conversations with them. It's simply because you get to learn so much by doing so. For me, this is a completely new experience: the first time being in Singapore and first time being immersed in the virtual worlds talk.
I'm very excited for tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to bring even more interesting stuff to you all.
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I'm sitting in the Ballroom of Marina Mandarin Hotel in Singapore. The State of Play V is about to begin!
I'll be reporting from the conference time to time (not quite sure about live blogging every session, but I'll do my best!)
Please let me know if there's anyone you want me to interview. I'm here as press so I might be able to :) Here's the list of speakers. Also, having a look at what metaverse means will obviously help you a great deal, here's a link to the wikipedia article.
Ok. See you soon!
A couple of snapshots:
I'll be reporting from the conference time to time (not quite sure about live blogging every session, but I'll do my best!)
Please let me know if there's anyone you want me to interview. I'm here as press so I might be able to :) Here's the list of speakers. Also, having a look at what metaverse means will obviously help you a great deal, here's a link to the wikipedia article.
Ok. See you soon!
A couple of snapshots:
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These virtual worlds are crucial building blocks of global civil society. As such, they harbor the promise for relationship-building and cooperation across national borders. Solutions to the cross-cultural growing pains of this new medium require a sincere commitment to transnational dialogue.I'm flying to Singapore on Sunday to attend the State of Play Conference.
As I briefly mentioned before, in order to appropriately cover the digital generation in Asia, the gaming culture and industry, now expanded to virtual worlds altogether, must be extensively studied. Unfortunately, my expertise has been more on Web 2.0 and Enterprise IT industry in general, not so much games and virtual worlds.
But they're all coming together. I get to interact with lots of kids of age 5-15 or so at church and they live in a different world than the one I grew up in. (I'm only 28 by the way). They don't seem to draw the line between the "real" world and the "virtual" world. The two worlds are so interchangable in their lives. What's imaginary and what's physical? They don't care and they don't know, but it's all in their minds. I get to talk to people working at NCSoft and Nexon, two largest game companies in Korea, and Cyworld. AND I HEAR SOME CRAZY STORIES FROM THEM.
IBM is training their employees in Second Life. When I attended Supernova in June, there was this great session on virtual worlds and I remember Raph Koster, one of the gurus in the field, saying "many of the Web 2.0 principles and phenomenon have come from games." I totally agree with him, especially as far as how social interactions are concerned.
I go to PC bangs and see middle/high school guys in their school uniforms spend 4 hours straight playing Starcraft, Lineage, WoW, FIFA, etc. after school. What's scary is how this is such a big part of their lives. I mean their real lives.
What would happen when you combine everything together? I mean combining different virtual worlds with blogs, mobile, social networks, and messengers. Maybe some efforts towards standardization would help? What if you can play WoW on the bus for an hour using Wibro on the way to school? What if your Cyworld buddy can be found on Club Penguin? Possibilities are endless, I think.
Of course, we'll be seeing various social and legal issues come up in this fast-developing medium as well. I know much about what's up with social networks and blogs. Can the same principles be applied to virtual worlds? What's the same? What's different?
We'll find out at the conference. I'm not sure if I'll be able to live-blog the conference, given I don't know much about the wireless connections at the site. But I'll be constantly feeding you guys with what I learn there. And trust me, what I'll be learning there will be extremely important to anyone who has anything to do with anything digital--Web 2.0/portal services, H/W & gadget makers, game makers, social networks makers, book publishers, network providers, teachers, legislators, parents, kids, or even HR people.
Should I go, "stay tuned and excited" again? ;) Well, I am!
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Lawrence, who always provides great great information to what I write on this blog, left a comment on the last post on "Digital everything in Korea". He said the page seemed to have been created out of a college project in Singapore.
When I saw that, something clicked. So I went back to the page and checked out the interview materials at the end of the document, only to realize that this is the project for which I was interviewed with. Last month, Manpreet Singh SARAN, from Singapore, working on a communications class project, emailed me, asking me about the Web 2.0 environment in Korea. I was able to answer the questions, which, in turn, were used to create the page. How awesome! I'm just glad that I was able to help.
Here's a link to the PDF version of my email interview. Just in case, I'm copying and pasting the whole text to this post as well. (I made changes to and polished up some of my comments down there because they were either gramaticaly wrong or I missed/misspelled some words, etc.)
Thanks, Lawrence and Manpreet!
When I saw that, something clicked. So I went back to the page and checked out the interview materials at the end of the document, only to realize that this is the project for which I was interviewed with. Last month, Manpreet Singh SARAN, from Singapore, working on a communications class project, emailed me, asking me about the Web 2.0 environment in Korea. I was able to answer the questions, which, in turn, were used to create the page. How awesome! I'm just glad that I was able to help.
Here's a link to the PDF version of my email interview. Just in case, I'm copying and pasting the whole text to this post as well. (I made changes to and polished up some of my comments down there because they were either gramaticaly wrong or I missed/misspelled some words, etc.)
Thanks, Lawrence and Manpreet!
1) A decision to require Web readers to use their real identities when posting articles online on Internet news sites is sparking concerns over privacy and free speech. What is your view on this?
While there’s been a great number of occasions where anonymity caused lots of real world problems in Korea, I don’t think the real identity regulation will be the cure for all. There will be lots of new problems springing from this kind of approach: freedom of speech will be threatened in many ways as there’ll be lots of people unable to honestly expressing their opinions. Privacy is obviously even a bigger concern. Making your real name up there won’t naturally create more responsible comments online. It’ll reduce both good and bad behaviors online. I’d say rather urging and educating many Internet users and companies to create an environment where people will be more responsible will eventually pay out.
2) What are some of the restrictions that the Korean online community is facing which prevents for further development in social media?
Practical applications, like flickr of del.icio.us, aren’t really taking off in Korea. Most of the popular applications except search are about making sites people-friendly. It’s social nature of the Web users in Korea, which I believe need some change.
3) What impact does citizen journalism have on the social media arena in Korea? How are sites like News 2.0 driving change?
Unfortunately, News 2.0 isn’t actually doing particularly well in Korea. OhMyNews has also lost its brightest shining moments as well. Online media has been completely concentrated around portals, like Naver and Daum, where both mainstream media and citizen-based media (often called UCC-User Created Content) are both very strong.
4) How powerful are Internet mobs in Korea? Does the “Dog Poop Girl” controversy have any consequences?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/6112754.stm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/07/06/AR2005070601953.html
We actually have seen incidents like Dog Poop Girl so many times that many people are almost numb to such things happening. People carry around digital cameras and camcorders all the time that you basically have eyes and ears everywhere. People sometimes try to act more responsibly out in public since they know the horrifying and tremendous consequences of things spreading so quickly online. Often people take for granted how (private) things can be discovered so easily. It’s happening at a greater scale and there isn’t much that can stop it from happening, I think.
5) How are Korean businesses using Web 2,0 to their advantages? Please highlight an example. For example, how are businesses leveraging on Naver?
The best case is obviously Naver Knowledge-iN, which has used user participation to answer other users' questions. This mechanism eventually made Naver the Wikipedia + Google of Korea. We have seen a very high level of participation among the Web users in Korea across many areas. However, Internet companies, especially portals, have been accused of not being particularly keen at opening up their services to the masses.
6) Why is the Korea online community so advanced in terms of using social networking sites(e.g. CyWorld) and Web 2.0 applications? Does Korean Culture or Government play a part in this?
It’s mainly two things: a great broadband connection (this is the govenment part) and a culture where everyone just loves flocking together. Unlike MySpace, Cyworld is much about “decorating” your own space with lots of fancy stuff, like avatars and virtual items. That’s played a great deal in the development of services like Cyworld.
7) How different is the Korean online community different from other communities in terms of internet behavior with regard to social networking sites?
The active Web participants in Korea in general are much younger in contrast to other countries, especially the Western ones. So we see a Web that is a lot more social and entertainment-oriented than heavy and more serious one in the West. Lots of bloggers in Korea only write about travelling, food, photography, relationships, or games while many in U.S., for example, would write about business, tech, and media.
8) At the moment, what are new exciting Web 2.0 developments taking place in the Korean Online Community?
There’s been a good number of venture startups putting efforts into developing the new “web 2.0” services in Korea. As mentioned above, the Web in Korea has been greatly concentrated around portals. While there has not been too many great success stories among those startups yet, many portals are slowly moving in the direction of finally distributing more traffic to outside of the portals. I see it as a great sign of the Korean Web moving in the right direction. The Web was never meant to be so concentrated.
9) What are the signs that the lines between mainstream media and social media are blurring?
Daum, one of the major portals in Korea, has started a service named “Blogger News”, where it’s a combination of Digg and OhMyNews. It’s trying to find the right balance between a completely user-based quality news and professional journalism. Many of the content sites, including blogs, video sites, and picture sites, are also displaying and leading traffic to both mainstream content and user generated content. What we often see is the social media content generated off one big mainstream news article.
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