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Blogs in Korea

Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: Yahoo! Korea Blog Service Launched

Well, one of my earlier posts was absolutely wrong, and as I’ve known for a couple of months, blogging in Korea is a rather massive phenomenon. That would explain why, as noted in the article I linked to above, Yahoo has, late as ever, launched a blog service in Korean. Of course, it seems to me from the fact I almost never ever see Korean computers displaying Yahoo.kr screens as the home page when Explorer starts up, that this will probably get very little attention at all. Daum and Naver and maybe a few more companies run the online-communities show in Korea… and even if their online communities are restrictive in terms of customization, they’re where the action is here. It makes me think of other situations when I have seen my Korean friends endure a surprising amount of discomfort for the sake of an established community or peer-group. I think if Daum opened the doors for much more free customization of its sites, people would get into it… but that it’s less likely that people will abandon the Daum cafe model en masse and go on their own for the sake of greater customizability.

In any case, my blog is only one paltry example among many far more entertaining and interesting blogs being written by both foreigners and native Koreans here. For those who are restricted to English, the following site is where you can have a look around: The Korean Blog List.

For those who can read Korean (or, like, try and sometimes just look at the pretty pictures when you fail) you can see Korean-language blogs by the dozen at the WIK (Weblogs in Korean) website. This place is shockingly full of absolutely exquisitely designed and entertaining blogs!

Finally, here are a couple of blogs by friends of mine in Korea, sent by friends who only let me know of their blogs’ urls today: Sun Hwa’s blog (she’s one of my frequent readers, and kindly gave me some advertisement a while ago), and my old Korean teacher Nam Suk’s blog (mainly in Korean but with many pictures of her during her recent trip to New Zealand).

One tiny note to people outside of Korea… the reason Sun Hwa’s blog title is funny is because the term “so-so” is one of those things that foreigners usually quickly discover is a commonly known English phrase here. For some reason, it entered the English curriculum a long time ago and so almost anyone you talk to knows and uses the expression. It’s used to an extent I’ve never encountered anywhere else in my life. So for me, “so-so” is a very very Korean thing to say. And yet, the title “My so-so life” also suggests familiarity with the kind of sardonic humor of a TV show like “My So-Called Life”, as well as a direct reference to it. When I saw that title it warranted a good chuckle, the kind you get from a well-timed in-joke. I quite liked it.

Now I wonder if i’ll be able to get Min Jung to get a blog going…

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