Also I attended BarCamp Miami and presented “Why not Web 2.0 in Korea?” that explains no boom-up status of Web 2.0 in Korea and why you check out Korea continually.

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Some people already knows Naver and Cyworld, but there is no famous successful startups although Korea has the highest broadband network and most wired people. You can see my presentation in slideshare.net too.

On Mix 08 keynote stage, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked about the latest Microsoft issues with Guy Kawasaki. Guy asked sixteen questions to Steve. After asking to shout “web” developers from one guy, Steve Ballmer screamed three times of “web developers”.

Guy’s questions for Steve Ballmer

1. Huge footprint on the consumer Web - what are you doing with it? Yahoo?
2. How will you win against Google?
3. Why are you still at Microsoft after all these years? Bill’s called it a day…
4. Sliverlight downloads progress?
5. Advertising?
6. What’s the current status with the EU?
7. What does the post-Bill Gates MS look like?
8. MS in too many businesses - have you lost focus?
9. Corp agility. Is MS the new IBM?
10. What is your social networking strategy?
11. What is Facebook really work?
12. Are you warried that Apple’s gaining share?
13. Next version of Windows underwheliming?
14. IE vs. Firefoix?
15. Live strategy - what is it?
16. Mobile. What’s MS’s iPhone?

You can see answers of Cnet and BetaNews’s live article.

update. Baller gives an action for Macbook Air.

Kawasaki pointed out that most people don’t have a choice and get it when they buy a PC. Ballmer then reached and grabbed Kawasaki’s MacBook Air out of an envelope. “Is this running Vista?” he asked. Kawasaki said that it wasn’t. The two then debated the merits of the machine.

“Don’t you want a machine this light?” Kawasaki asked, with Ballmer saying his Toshiba laptop weighs less. “That thing is missing half the features,” Ballmer said, referring to the MacBook. “Where’s the DVD drive?”

1. CSS 2.1: Web Standards

2. CSS Certification: passing Acid 2 Test

3. Performance : JavaScript

4. HTML 5 : Ajax navigation, offline supporting.

5. Developer Tools: HTML, CSS, Script debugging

6. Activities : Contextual search and web utility e.g Ebay on IE8

7. WebSlices - clipping web contents with simple makrup.

8. IE8 beta 1 is now rock! IE8 download after keynote.

I’m in front of keynote stage of Mix08. Enjoy song! In 10 minutes, you can enjoy keynote in streaming. Have a interesting times!

How about check about Flickr photos and blog posts.

Recently there are new startup services for SNS such as LinkNow.kr, Hutory.net and People2.co.kr. I reviewed these in detail, but I couldn’t find unique things compared with abroad SNS services.

The Web 2.0 trend makes a duplication of ideas and innovations too such as a example of Germany. Korea is not except, Me2day and PlayTalk was on debate who copied ideas and concept each other, but they’re also clones of the Twitter style.

Furthermore, I could find similar icons and user interface as if they want to copy them without weight on mind. Linknow is almost clone of early LinkedIn. As one of heavy user of LinkedIn, I’m very inconvenienced for that. Many newspapers remarked its starting because the founder was influential on that area.

Hutory.net is also very similar with Facebook interface. All of collections are shown in one page such as photo, profile, friends, groups and comments simpler than Cyworld. But, it is a clone of Facebook clone in Germany StudiVZ

Someone may say that clone services are rather than no trying. Copying interface and icons is on a charge of the larceny of intellectual property rights.

His Korean blog has over 5,000 subscribers and popular to Web 2.0 mania. He studied in Cornell University and worked in Samsung SDS as a system engineer.

Recently he took decisive action to quit his job and swings to full time blogger after his brave journey. He wrote why he starts new blog as followings:

But, here’s what’s important. The gap between the young generation in East and West is closing. The reason is because better broadband and mobile infrastructures are now set place in the West while the East is learning to be somewhat more “logical” and “open” on the Web like the West has been. However, more than anything, the digital generation from both East and West is developing a culture that is commonly observed across all different countries, philosophies, races, ethnicities, languages, and continents. Seriously, an average 6th grader from Japan has a much higher chance to be like an average 6th grader from Canada than ever before. They play games, send numerous SMS messages to friends, listen to mp3s through iPod. What does that say about business opportunities? Plenty, I think.

So, that’s why this blog exists.

If you want to know more cultural effects of broadband effect, you can enjoy his fun and good stories there. My blog has very simple topics for Korean web business, but you can read more thing in detail in Web 2.0 Asia or TechnoKimchi.

Naver explained their unique characteristics of its search engine and service evolved by Korean user’s requirement over time. It’s different style with Google and foreign search engine.

They called it as ‘Multiple or Integrated Search‘ that shows results by information collections such as own-made databases and web documents together whereas global search engines are based on only web documents.

Of course, other search engine have tried how to give good results by collections such as Yahoo! Alpha, Ask X, Microsoft Imagine Live, even Google’s own Searchmash.

Retuning to Naver, it started a method of Integrated Search in 7 years ago. In 1999, the number of web sites written in korean was under 50,000. It’s very different environment compared with English web sites.

There were search engines but weren’t web sites to be indexed. So Naver decided to avoid crawling based search results and utilize own-made databases cooperated with contents providers with fee such as music, movie, news and book.

Naver calls each one as a collection. If an user query artist name, it shows a result of each collection from artist database as like All Music Guide, music news, blog articles and web results. Each collections were shown in equal divisions with 3 to 4 items in the search result page.

Naver has various collections to find proper results per each search keyword. A number of them may over 30 such as Q&A(Knowledge In), forums (aka Cafe), blogs, image, news, dictionary, video, music, book and shopping etc.

Multiple Ranking Model
Generally search results depend on search modeling and ranking method calculated by mathematical and experienced formula. Google has own page ranking model referring to linking in web page. But, Naver has many collections and their complicated ranking model.

Firstly Naver has the collection ranking model that change the exposure sequence of collections by user’s action per each keyword. It was decided where users who input a same keyword found information in as like clicking a link and page back actions.

For example, if you query for “Summer Time”, because users tend to find the definition and background of “Summer Time”, collections of dictionary and Q&A ranks high. In case of “Britney Spears”, collections of music, shopping and news does high in search results.

Also each collection has own ranking model itself, for instance, the latest is important weight in news collection as well matching and frequency in news sources. In Q&A collection, the credibility of answerers is the ranking factor rather than others. So each collection assigns priority and show items in order by an individual ranking model.

As well it avoids duplicated results by controlling between collection ranking model. It results that an user can find proper items not to be overlapped in each collection. If the similar ranking model is applied in each collection, there will be duplicated results in them.

It is possible that over 16 million users visit Naver’s search and queries 100 millions in every day - i.e. 1,172 query per second in July, 2007. So Naver can find Korean’s general trends why they input that keyword. It means they offer perfect results for Korean. In the other hands, it reflects that Korean has rare diversity and unique habits in life patterns.

I think it’s a result of broadband effect too. People watch popular TV drama and news in everyday and read newspaper and are interested in entertainment gossips. It means Internet is not tools for finding information, but life tools to talk with others in broadband environment. Nowadays many Koreans watch TV program and often query search keyword such as actor’s name, program issues from TV program at the same time.

Basically I think it will be same in abroad environment even though Google’s ranking model is now popular rather than Naver’s. Also most of foreign competitors want to resemble Naver’s success. It depends how many broadband users utilizes search services as life tools.

In 2004, the number of registered bloggers is over 3000 and there were the latest new article by unique bloggers. It was different from foreign blog search engine such as Technorati or IceRocket. Even though all of them are based on subscription of RSS feeds, BlogKorea didn’t crawl bloger’s site by search bots and offered the latest and highest recommended articles as like Digg.com or NewsVine.

But, it’s just volunteer-based services and there was not professional support. In result, it lost all article saved in database of unexpected outage. After a few days, Allblog.net was coincidentally opened with similar interface of BlogKorea. Allblog had new interface and good function rather than BlogKorea. So many of bloggers moved to Allblog. At last, BlogKore was little more than a name. Yes, it’s sad story.

The brand of BlogKorea was sold to OhMyNews, the famous online citizenship news site in January 2007. But there was no good action and result, so it was sold to MediaU again. Jisun Lee, CEO of MediaU announced the plan of relaunching of BlogKorea in June.

She has various background from news reporter to PR manager, finally studied in US and examined changes of new Internet marketing. Especially blogging culture was attractive to her. MediaU announced to prepare blog advertisement, consulting of enterprise marketing based on blogkorea.org in launching party.

Early bloggers already were good at using Allblog. Even if they delighted to relaunch it, I cannot commit myself whether BlogKorea gains blogger’s attention or not.

So it is very big news to Open ID ecosystem in the world. Daum gives a type of http://openid.daum.net/myid URL format as well ones blog URL such as http://blog.daum.net/myid.

Daum Open ID sites is also secures with EV SSL cetificates.

The video sharing service needed high cost of network bandwidth and server systems including encoding and distribution. So most of service providers mind to enter this market. After the success of YouTube, many of service providers started to enter this area such as portal sites.

Now there are two separating providers: one is the video section service of portal sites and the other is independent service providers. The former is Daum TVPot, Naver Play, Yahoo! Yami (now shut-down), Cyworld Video and Freechal Q. The latter includes Pandora.tv, Mncast, Mgoon, Dedeo, UCCC and TagStory.

In US market, Youtube is almost exclusive and Myspace, Google and Yahoo! Video were followed. But, Korean market is very competitive between portal and independent sites.

As following is the monthly unique visitor’s trend for video sites researched by KoreanClick on June, 2007 via Daum Advertising Focus Blog. You can know the strong entrance of portal sites after January in this year. But, Pandora.tv(845M) occupies still the highest market share, and Daum TVPot(841M) is followed. And Mncast, Naver Play, Mgoon, Freechal Q, DioDeo, Cyworld Video, UCCC.

Where is the YouTube here? According to Rankey.com’s research in June, YouTube has only 3% market share except portal sites. (Pandora.tv 33%, Mncast 14%, Mgoon 11%). It proved Korea is the grave of famous global web sites.

Recently Google unveiled new search results user interface called Universal Search that unify and blend search results across their collection such as web search, news, blogs, images and videos, etc. It means Google divided details properties from mass index of web pages and it will be important to show proper collections by query.

But, this bucket test is more advanced to be suitable for Korean’s search viewpoint. It has four collection box such as web results, image, news and blog per a query. It also added link of “more results” in each section and remove typical number navigation in below.

Does Google really change its universal interface to win Korean market? Please check out full screenshot.

But, I thought it was bias caused by the result of rare ordinary people. (Google is just under 2% market share in here- most of technical guys only have used Google. In result, Google Trends might fix this bias after issuing of this fact.

Recently I reviewed search trends of “Web 2.0″, more surprisingly it was Taiwan and India. In recent period in 2006~2007, Singapore and Japan was included.

In case of “Web 2.0 vs . Web2.0” with no space, Japan is very high in the world.

As following are Taiwan, South Korea, China and India. Most of Asian don’t use no space-word language, so they tend to write no space among words.

Anyway Asian people have been interested in Web 2.0 rather than other continent even though there are some bias of big population and low market share with technically major users. How about “Web 3.0″? It’s very similar result with “Web 2.0″.

How about your thought?

But this speech offered very good insights in media area specially old media and advertisement market. You can watch a clip of this speech via Youtube

In speech, I was very impressed on marketing strategy of Wired.com via 1) Reach (Generate traffic by optimizing for use of search, 3rd party linking and feeds 2) Reader experience (Keep traffic) without advertisement, 3) Selling subscriptions (gathering qualified customers) and 4) Selling advertisement to only subscribers.

His point is very important to make traffic by linking strategy with a unit of each story or page and offers convenient reading experiences. Once one became royalty customer, in that time you would offer advertisement to them, so you get very high effect of advertisement.

I had very similar experience in Feedburner Advertisement Network. A number of subscribers to my Korean blog feed is almost 5,000 people. From March to June, the CTR is average over 10%.

It means effect of subscription-based advertisement is higher than web page advertisement such as Google AdSense. Chis’s point is very important to old media web sites and company such as newspapers and magazines.

Anyway rich interface is not new one because Google, Yahoo! and MSN already showed Ajax based mail services. But, it’s first time implementation in Korea. The most important thing is user experiences in Ajax based web applications. Hanmail team introduced the video of paper-based user test in prototype stage. It’s very funny.

Now closed beta was processed by opinion leaders in Hanmail including me. It’s very good and convenient functions, and you can watch some videos for them.

He said web 2.0 is marketing term, but he indicated there is new trends in view of web applications. His view of web applications are very simple, easy, everywhere virus groups to treat all of data.

Some people said Web 3.0 is completion of semantic web (automated intelligence by computers), but I think web is very cultural resources made by human, so the next web is the cultural-hybrid web applications to help user’s data treatment. The key point is very easy web applications in everywhere.

In Korea, many people web 2.0 is not new one any more because Korean web sites already have induced user-participated services such as Iloveschool (Korean Facebook), Cyworld (Korean MySpace and Flickr) and Naver Q&A search (Korean UGC search) under fast broadband penetration and highly connected society. But, there was no attempt to make web ecosystem based “OPEN” technology platform and collaboration with 3rd party partners. It’s different between Korean and world based web platform.

Why New Conference?
I believe technology community is very important to lead web industry and always think it needs open space freely to discuss without any burden. So I have tried to make un-conference style meeting and gather technology people in this industry since last year. At last my efforts have come to fruition. It’s Web Applications Confernece 2007 on June 21th. 2007. It is very similar motif Future of Web Applications Confernece, but the format is completely different.

It was originated by small tutorial session of NGWEB 2006 in last year. The Web Applicaions Workshop shared techniques about Ajax, Ruby, Widgets and Adobe Flex. There were over 200 web developers. It’s new technical changes in this era, i.e. rich web such as Ajax, and rich internet such as Adobe AIR, Microsoft Sliverlight and various widgets, and lightweight web framework. Afterwards, I earned many previous people in my community, Web 2.0 W/G, Future web forum and Web Standards Community.

Many colleagues of vendors in my community were willing to help my plan of open technical festival. Over 10 companies decided to sponsor this conference. This conference was basically volunteer based event, unpaid program committee, event staff and speakers with very low fee. Also the entry fee was just $20 and free to country people. The total number of registrant was 1,063 people.

13 hours, full day conference
This conference consisted of three parts of programs i.e technical workshop in the morning, main conference in the afternoon and vision festival in the night for 13 hours. Many people was worried about full day conference, in fact, there remained only about 200 people in the night. But, people can meet many chance to satisfy own needs in tutorial, lecture, demonstration, panel discussion, coding lab and sponsors cafe.

The five workshops was very helpful for people to get concrete concept and tips. It included Ajax and Web Standards, Future of Rich Internet, Web 2.0 tutorial, Open APIs and Mashup. Especially it was very popular to treat minor web framework such as TurboGears, Erlang and Seaside. It was progressed with real-time coding laboratory.

Good speakers gave a ready consent to this conference including Dr. Kilnam Chon, founder of Korean Internet and Mr. Dennis Hwang, webmaster of Google, Raju Bitter of Openlaszlo and Laurence of Microsoft.

Panel discussions were also interesting such as OpenID technology, collaboration in team project. Especially there are all vendors in Adobe, Microsoft, Thinkfree and Openlaszlo in panelists of rich web applications. Especially Adobe and Microsoft invest marketing promotion to make good examples why Korea takes a serious view of user experience. (Alway it has experimented new technology and adopted in rapid progress.)

Also good demonstrations impressed attendances such as Hanmail Express (Ajax based web mail) by Daum and Ajax-based online payment system by Paygate. The 10 minutes session is very good to explain the core without a superfluous one, but it’s very difficult to manage time if a speaker troubled in his demonstration, in fact, Mr. Changshin cannot do that well because of network problems. If you want to do 10 min. demo, you must prepare online and offline (screencast) demo too.

Most funny place was sponsor cafe to talk with people and get gifts, especially google’s rare item. Most popular item was Dennis’s autograph and to take picture with him in Google Korea’s booth. Also Microsoft booth offered funny games and interviewed attendances name of MSDN.tv. Yahoo! Korea also distributed Flickr stickers and Daum UCC(User-created Contents) marked drinking water.

Vision Night and Festival
After dinner, there were over 200 people. Firstly we enjoyed exciting music concert by Garina Project who is famous of funny online music videos. It’s very cool time to be in a buoyant spirit with free and open mind together.

The panel, “How to start-ups?” was very good experience by seniors consisted of VC and start-ups. Whereas, two students told us success stories of mashup of Open APIs and building of open source community. It was the harmony between old and new ideas.

Finally, Dr. Chon gave a keynote speech about the future of Korean Internet. He said that Korea is highly developed county in Internet infra system, but there has been just below 5% contributions to Internet technology. He emphasized more contribution especially such as open source and open standards. All attendances applauded to him on standing up after his speech.

After conference, there are many feedbacks that it was very good time. I set up wireless Internet in conference area for online lab and real time blogging, but someone troubled to connect. Anyway there are over 700 messages on spot from Me2day, korean Twitter, over 160 blog posts and over 1000 photos in Flickr. It’s really Korean web 2.0 festival. Thanks to all volunteers and attendances.

This event is very similar format with MIX 07 to avoid formal type. It gave various program such as talk show, panel discussion and meetup of attendance with speaker

The main agenda of this event was Microsoft Sliverlight too. Mr. Goodhyun Kim, technical evangelist for web ecosystem empathized qualified user experience under fast bandwidth and high computing power.

So the first talk was the conversation and demonstration of guys in broadcasting companies such as MBC, SBS and Mnet. All of them showed their prototype for online video services using Microsoft Sliverlight.

You can see these demo in Session 1 (required Sliverlight runtime). Especially Mnet’s demo was very excellent. Mnet is the famous music cable TV channel so called korean MTV.

Also korean leading portal, NHN and Daum were invited and talked with Mr. Kim. They presented demos of sliverlight based online game from NHN and windows gadget from Daum. Also there were so exciting demonstration from MotionCloud and Metoday.

You can see these demo Session 2 (required Sliverlight runtime).

If you’re interested in Microsoft Sliverlight, you can see keynotes of Brian Goldfa and Laurence Moroney in english. Also you can refer to another ReMIX event in Asian region such as Singapore, Hongkong and Austrailia

Maybe not. Already most people has shared their photos Naver Photo as well Cyworld. Anyway I’m very glad to see korean Flickr as an user.

Skype was promoted by Auction, the branch of Ebay in Korea. Most of Korean don’t know what Skype is. There are many messaging solutions in Korea such as high usages of moblie phone & SMS, instant messaging with Nateon Messenger offering free SMS service.

First VoIP service was started in Korea named Dialpad in mid of 90. Is Skype can be succeeded in Korea? Maybe not. There are many method to communicate each others in Korea

In this year, there are many leading invited speakers including Eric Schmidt and Chris Anderson. I only heard Eric and Chris’s speaking but, most of them is very useful not only to Korean, but to all.

You can watch VOD service in home page, but you must have user id and ActiveX plugin for playing. As following is direct links of major VOD services. (Please click left “Korean” button to play DRM-based windows media files.)

Eric Schmidt - mms://storage3.sbs.co.kr/et/0963/et0963e0200707.asf
Chris Anderson - mms://storage3.sbs.co.kr/et/0963/et0963e0200710.asf
Anne Sweeney - mms://storage3.sbs.co.kr/et/0963/et0963e0200719.asf
Tom Curley - mms://storage3.sbs.co.kr/et/0963/et0963e0200715.asf

You can watch various VODs if you type random numbers from 01 to 20 in mms://storage3.sbs.co.kr/et/0963/et0963e02007xx.

This event seems very expensive conference, but most of people were just leading politics for presidential election in this year and foreign business man in Korea, or university student and press reporters. Especially press reporters were only focused on Eric and Google Korea.

Anyway it’s good chance to hear thoughts of leading opinion leaders about media convergence.

They contacted and gathered various participators. So we had the chance to think more cultural theme as well as technical subjects.

In this camp, over 70 people were joined in Daum HQ on Saturday, June 1th. It covered Web 2.0 services and technology including OpenID and Open APIs, the business model for search and video service, UGC copyright and legal issue as like Creative Commons, internet movie festival, IT labor movement, WIPO- Access to Knowledge and digital archiving etc.

Most of them were male and married, so they wanted to be “really camp” together with their family in next camp. They enjoyed informal meeting with new people, delicious meals and sharing thoughts. I hope there are many barcamp style meeting in another areas in Korea.

I connected Raju bitter of Openlaszlo who engaged to BarCamp Berlin and knew Korea well. He introduced Chris Messina, the founder of BarCamp. I was very glad to email with him. He’ve been to South Korea once before and it’s thrilling to see BarCamp come back around for a second time. How about becoming more global in next BarCampSeoul with foreigners in Korea?

You can see more photos in Hollobit albums and LoveSara.