This week: An International Web 2.0 Special!
In this week's Wrap-Up, I'm going to focus on international (read: non-US) Web 2.0 activities. The US and San Francisco in particular will always be the center of Web Technology business, but it's good to take notice of the rest of the world every now and then too.
When it comes to broadband and wireless technologies, Korea is far ahead of the rest of the world. Check out these figures from Chief Executive magazine (April 2004):
"Of the nearly 16 million Korean households, 78 percent now have a broadband connection—or more than four times the home broadband penetration rate of North America."
Not only is broadband penetration high, but the speeds are very fast ("on average four times faster" than in the US) and broadband services are well-used by Korean people.
One of my Korean readers, Taewoo Danny Kim, pointed out some popular Korean web services in a recent comment on Read/Write Web. He mentioned Cyworld (a social networking site - good write-up here), bugsmusic (a music streaming service) and Ohmynews (the world's premier citizen journalism website). Of Cyworld, Danny said it's extremely popular with Korean teenagers and is superior to the likes of Orkut and Friendster "when it comes to UI and the range of functions provided".
Other Korea Web 2.0 links:
- Danny's blog, which I understand is the equivalent
of Read/Write Web in the Korean language, in terms
of its focus on Web 2.0.
- Broadband:
Lessons from South Korea
- Wired: Seoul of a
New Machine
- TechDirt: Korea,
The Test Bed
- Marc
Canter: "I'm becoming a Korea-phile."
As I mentioned this week, it's my goal to live and work in Silicon Valley. But if I can't work there, maybe I'll head over to Vancouver in Canada. It seems to be a hotbed for innovative Webheads and in particular Web 2.0 people. Roland Tanglao, Boris Mann, Will Pate, Richard Eriksson, Kris Krug and all the other fine folks from companies like Bryght and Raincity Studios.
Judging by all the great posts on Urban Vancouver, this is one happening place. It must be if Marc's over there doing business!
I recently came across an interesting post by Toni Sant from the little country of Malta (just off the coast of Italy). Its population is not much over 400,000 - yet according to Toni the Internet is helping to "re-map" the country:
"Although Malta is a tiny nation dominated by majority rule, embodied in the major political parties and the Roman Catholic church, a small digital community is about to embark on a path of social change which potentially has a much larger effect than any other effort the same social network could attempt without the benefit of the electronic networks of digital telecommunications."
Toni goes on to specifically mention Web 2.0 and "the power and potential of the read/write applications" that are enabling Malta citizens to express themselves and work towards social change.
The movie business has helped New Zealand become known as MiddleEarth, but in terms of Web Technology we're more like BackwaterEarth. Nevertheless there are pockets of innovation down here. A company called Eurekster is making Web 2.0 products from Christchurch (home of the Peter Jackson of programmers, Phil Pearson). Eurekster is a kind of social networking search engine. It bills itself as "the first truly democratic search engine platform" - take that Google!
Eurekster is one of many companies around the world exploring the personalized search frontier, like Findory and PubSub. It has links with Friendster and is generally doing very well for itself for a little kiwi company. Go you good things!
I hope you enjoyed this mini-tour of Web 2.0 in the international community. I didn't even mention India, China, Britain, or the other countries I wanted to talk about. But never fear, I will aim to write more of these kinds of posts - even when I'm living and working in The Valley ;-)
That's a wrap for another week!
Comments
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You basically concluded in this post that there's only one mission left for us, "the rest of the world", to accomplish. That is,
"Take over the world!"
;) j/k.
But for reals, thanks for the great post.
Posted by: twdanny | June 21, 2005 2:15 AM
You know Richard, there is a city between the Silicon Valley and Vancouver that has a lot to offer too. It's called Seattle. ;) Perhaps you'd consider it too?
Posted by: Lee LeFever | June 21, 2005 6:09 AM
Lee, thanks for the reminder ;-) The main issue for me though will be getting a work visa for the US, so that's why I mentioned Canada. But I really hope I can work in the US and be part of The American Dream :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | June 21, 2005 8:42 AM
Richard, that's exactly why I moved to Vancouver!
Lee's right, Seattle is sweet too, but you might have an easier time moving to Canada as we're part of the Commonwealth.
Posted by: Will Pate | June 21, 2005 9:03 AM