Welcome to our Korean overlords

Well, Korea may have been nudged out of the World Cup finals by Switzerland, but a recent article by Chris Taylor, senior editor of Business 2.0, opines that the Land of the Morning Calm is also on the leading edge of Internet trends.

Thanks to a smart, early investment in the nation’s broadband infrastructure, the Korean Internet is blazing trails in online business culture. Taylor thinks Cyworld, a feature-rich, social networking community similar to MySpace, may provide a model for Western online development:

Cyworld has penetration rates that would make Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp., green with envy: An astonishing 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s use the service. Celebrities and politicians set up their own minihompies [short for "mini-home pages"], and the way to get ahead in twentysomething Korean society is to found a popular Cyworld club, or chat room.

I’ve always felt my Korean friends’ Cyworld minihompies were a little saccharine, but then if you told me three years ago that MySpace would be the juggernaut it is today I would have laughed.