Thursday, January 13, 2005

The Korean Mini-Hompy

Everybody is blogging, so I finally decided to start a public weblog of my own when I stumbled over the Blogger icon on Google. Maybe I'll move this to another server soon, possibly my own.

A news item that fascinated me last week was this:

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/exclusive/200411/kt2004112518452663570.htm

In Korea, eleven million people (as of November 2004) subscribe to a service called "Cyworld", which allows them to post personal "Mini Hompys", or mini-homepages. It seems to be a convincing combination of a homepage/blog hosting service, social software (personal homepages can somehow be interlinked), with the possibility of uploading images from camera phones.

But the fact that 11 million South Koreans use this service is absolutely stunning to me - this is more than a quarter of the country's total population, and I assume that in many subclasses of the population (age and/or social groups), penetration must be so close to 100% that it will be considered weird if you're not a subscriber.