Naver.com to release Opencast this Sunday

Written on 25th February 2009                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

South Korean search engine Naver.com announced the release of Opencast this Sunday March 1st. I had a brief introduction by an Naver employee about the new feature. In short, Opencast can be best described as a widget showing random blogposts with a Twitter-like subscription function. (get it?) Ah, well… Perhaps you should see the video for an impression, or at least to see how slick the admin panel looks.

Naver.com has over 150 million views per day, the fact that they are tapping user generated content and displaying it on their frontpage is an interesting development.

How it works for publisher a ‘Opencaster’:

1. ‘Opencasters’ post their content on their blog/site/etc.
2. They visit an admin panel on naver.com to login
3. Add text (excerpt) and/or pictures with their link
4. Their post get displayed in random during an X amount of time on the website

How it works for reader:

1. People visiting the site see the headlines on the page
2. Click through or subscribe (after login) to certain posts
3. Get displayed same or simular headlines in the future

I like the idea because it’s like integrating a meaningful public timeline into a page as popular as Google, and I am a firm believer that a western equilavent would be a big hit.

The video is narrorated in Korean but should offer some idea of the service.

Naver.com

According to the December ‘08 issue of KoreanClick, South Korean search engine Naver accounts for 75% of the total Internet searching activity in Korea, leaving Google with a mere 3%. Perhaps because the search engine company defines search in this country. Read more about Naver…

google, Naver, opencast, twitter

5 Comments »

If you like the web, I bet you love South Korea too

Written on 10th June 2008                                                                                                              14 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

That is, if you like to be connected to the Internet all day, while enjoying the fastest connections in the world! Enter the hyper connected society, with an astounding 90 percent of the country connected with 3G and a nation wide coverage of a South Korean version of Wimax.

How and why did South Korea become an overlord in Internet speed? In short; the South Korean government introduced a number of policy instruments to stimulate technological learning, aimed to strengthen international competitiveness of the economy. The government launched a five-year plan to create a ubiquitous networked world in 1995, meaning that the country developed a stunning 1.5 billion dollar wireless network to stimulate the use of the Internet.

Today, South Korea is the most connected country on earth, but the funny thing is that we hardly hear anything about Korea’s web scene. This made us curious about what websites are popular over there, and if Korea has a web 2.0 scene. To find that out, we reviewed the three visited websites in Korea and we interviewed Chang W. Kim, Korean web 2.0 enthusiast and initiator of the Open Web Asia ‘08 conference.

(more…)

3g, asia, Cyworld, Daum, facebook, korea, marketing, Naver, South Korea, Start-ups, TechCrunch, web 2.0, Wibro, Wimax

14 Comments »