www.jamesflarson.com not accessible from Korea

This post relates to my personal website, www.jamesflarson.com, which I have hosted with an ISP in the United States for nearly a decade now.  About three or four days ago, I suddenly noticed that I could not access my own site from my office here in Seoul.  This is the first time I've had any difficulty accessing my personal site, which basically serves as an electronic resume and source of information about my background, including books and other publications.
Our network administrator advised pinging the site and doing a traceroute, which we did a couple of days ago. I then contacted my ISP in the U.S. and verified that there is no server-side problem there.  Another individual independently verified that www.jamesflarson.com can be reached from within the U.S.
Meanwhile, as the owner and the author of the site, my attempts to reach it from here in Seoul seem to drop off the internet at a Kornet router somewhere here in Korea, to the best of our knowledge.  Tomorrow I'll ask another staff member to follow up with Kornet.   This type of network problem is a nuisance, to say the least.  I'll look forward to learning what happened and reporting on it here.

Search, Blogs and Social Networking in Korean Cyberspace

A headline in today's Korea Times declares that "Daum Challenges Naver, Cyworld in Blog Battle."   The basic premise of the article is that web portals are increasingly relying upon user-created content to attract traffic.  Since acquiring Tistory blog services from Tatter & Company (TNC) in 2007, Daum's blog services have increased in popularity and are gaining ground on Naver, the market leader in blogging services.
It turns out that the web traffic reports that measure the popularity of blogs, also show that Cyworld, South Korea's leading social networking site attracts a lot of web traffic.  Daum and Naver both offer search services, whereas Cyworld is not a major competitor in this area.
It seems to me that in search, blogs and social networking you have three very different kinds of web services.  Although the Korea Times article compares the "blogging services" of each, Naver is basically a search engine, Daum is a web portal with search and other capabilities, and Cyworld is a social networking site, a la "Second Life." Search is a basic function that helps people locate the information they seek in the flood of information produced on the internet.  A blog is a way of publishing one's own information on the internet and networking with others interested in those topics.  Social networking has less to do with publishing anything and much more to do with simply socializing in a 21st century manner.
Because of their different origins and emphases it is extremely difficult to compare web traffic to the three sites compared in this article.  By their very nature, they are inherently aiming at different market segments to generate their traffic.

Koreans Trust the Internet, Blogs as News Sources

More sense can be made of the current political upheaval in South Korea over importing American beef against the backdrop of a 2006 survey conducted in ten countries for the BBC, Reuters and the American Press Institute's Media Center. What made Korea stand out among the ten countries in this study was the degree of trust shown in the internet as a source of news. Approximately 85% of South Koreans asked said they put a high value on accessing news over the internet, a much higher proportion than in other countries. As shown in the graphic to the left, over a third of Koreans named the internet as their most important source of news. Especially amoung young people, there has been a switch from reliance on television as a news source to the internet. This pattern can be seen in all ten of the countries in the survey, but it is most pronounced in Korea. The survey cites the impact of Korea's advanced communications infrastructure, noting that over 86% of households (that percentage is now well over 90 percent) are online. "The supremacy of TV is in danger of being usurped by the internet. A third of Koreans cite the net as their most important source of news, rivalling the 41% who cite TV. It is also one of the most positive countries about blogs, with 38% trusting them compared to the 10-country average of 25%. " The full poll results can be downloaded in PDF format from the BBC and they contain some interesting glimpses of the new communication environment emerging in South Korea. Seventy-one percent of South Koreans think that government interferes too much with the media, a percentage exceeded only in Nigeria (where 74% hold that view). Seventeen percent of South Koreans named blogs as their most important news source, compared with only 3 percent in the other nine countries surveyed.

Useful Links and Blogs on Korea's Information Society

With a little help from my friends I've started exploring the blogosphere to see what kind of information is being published about Korea's telecommunications development and its nascent information society. For the time being I will simply post them as "useful links" on the right-hand section of this blog, but I plan to impose a more efficient topical organization on the links as their number grows. From my own research on The Telecommunications Revolution in Korea and my efforts to follow developments over the past decade, I've discovered that certain government ministries and their affiliated institutes here in Korea are an invaluable source of data, both Korean and English language. I've posted some of those links, including the Ministry of Information and Communication, The Korea Information Society Development Institute, and the National Information Society Agency. There are more links to come in this category and not all are affiliated only with the Ministry of Information and Communication. Among international organizations, the International Telecommunications Union and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are must visits for anyone with a serious interest in following developments here in Korea. Blogs on the topic promise to be another very helpful source of information for understanding what is going on in South Korea as it constructs broadband convergence networks that are intended to lead to a ubiquitous Korea and a version here on the peninsula and globally of Web2.0.