As everyone knows, joy is sweeter and sorrow less bitter when you can share your feelings with someone. It is our interaction with each other that gives our lives meaning and makes living more worthwhile. And as such, we have sought to share our emotions with others ever since the development of language. Throughout history, this motivation has remained unchanged; only the media have changed for the sharing of our experiences. On the cusp of the new millennium, a new medium was born that has since swept the world: the “blog.” Korea has been caught up in this wave as well, along with developing a unique blogging culture of its own.

Worldwide Phenomenon
The word “blog” is derived from the neologism “weblog,” coined in 1997 by John Barger to describe a series of dated posts, displayed from newest to oldest. But the medium itself predates the term, going back to the early days of the World Wide Web. Although there is no general agreement as to exactly when blogging began, it entered the mainstream with the founding of the blogging services Pitas and Blogger in 1999. It is not possible to know exactly how many blogs there are today, but Technorati, a popular blog search engine, reported that they had compiled an index of 112.8 million blogs in 2008.
It was a few years before the blogging wave reached Korean shores, but in 2001, the Weblog-In-Korea site was founded. This was a community of around 150 early bloggers that wrote the first chapter of Korea’s blog history. As was the case in the United States, it was not until services emerged that catered to the interests of bloggers that the phenomenon began to gain steam. For example, CyWorld, a social networking site founded in 1999, launched a “mini-homepage” service in 2001. This was a free service that allowed users to post messages and share photos, with an option to buy extras, such as background images and outfits for their avatars, to personalize their online presence. This service began to really take off in the fall of 2002.
In 2003, the founding of AbleClick, the first professional blogging service in Korea, marked the start of the portal-blog era and the blog’s entry into the Korean mainstream. In response to this new trend, commercial Internet portal sites, such as Daum, Nate, Naver, and Yahoo Korea, launched their own competing blogging services. The portal blogging services introduced the regular Korean Internet user to blogging and have since maintained a strong presence in Korea’s “blogosphere.” Blogging has since taken root as an integral aspect of Korean Internet culture, as evidenced by “power bloggers,” who have attained varying measures of fame and fortune through their focused blogs, as well as the multitude of Internet users for whom blogging is simply another part of everyday life.

Korea’s Blogosphere
The blog is now a firmly established element of Korean culture. When the public relations firm Edelman released its “Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere” in 2007, they ranked Korea second, behind only Japan, in terms of percentage of the entire population that read blogs regularly, at 43 percent. Similarly, the Korea Internet & Security Agency released a report that stated that among the Internet users in Korea, some 56.8 percent read blogs regularly, and 42.9 percent maintained their own blogs.
Along with its widespread popularity, blogging has also led to the emergence of the so-called “power blogger.” In general, a power blogger will focus on a specific field, such as cooking, film reviews, or even blogs themselves, and build up a loyal and large following through frequent posts of high-quality content. Many of them are able to turn blogging into a full-time career, earning income by attracting ad sponsors to their blog site or publishing books culled from the blog’s original content.
Mun Seongsil is a mother of twin sons who operates a number of cooking websites. Her posts feature tasty recipes supplemented by vivid, step-by-step photos. She has published four books thus far based on the recipes on her websites. Meanwhile, Yi Jiseon oversees the metablog known as BlogKorea. Metablogs are, as the name suggests, blogs about blogs, or websites that identify the best of the blogosphere and present it to readers in a convenient way. Appropriately enough, she has published a how-to book about blogs: Building a Blog: From Computer Illiterate to Power Blogger. Choe Munjeong is another power blogger who has since entered the publishing industry. She is rather unique in that she does not specialize in a particular area, such as cooking or blogs, but simply in telling stories about her experiences. Her storytelling style is so popular that her blog recorded its one-millionth visitor only two years after its launch, and since then she has founded her own publication business that has published two collections of her stories.
Traditionally, the barriers to entry into fields such as publishing or journalism can be fairly high, and members of these areas tend to work their way slowly up the ladder. Blogging has lowered most of these entry barriers, and power bloggers have shown that anyone can succeed if they have sufficient talent, are enthusiastic about their chosen field and willing to invest the time and energy necessary. Whatever the entry barriers that need to be overcome, power bloggers such as Choe Munjeong have shown an ability to succeed by taking matters into their own hands. Their influence and motivation are such that they can sidestep traditional media outlets, cutting out the middleman and connecting directly to their loyal readership and new readers as well.
Of course, not everyone can be a successful power blogger, and the vast majority of the Korean blogosphere consists of little-known bloggers. Some aspire to become power bloggers, but most are content to simply set up their own roadside stand along the information highway. Some have CyWorld mini-homepages where they share photos with friends and family, while others have blogs on one of the several portal-based services, where they share their thoughts on life and a variety of subjects.
The image of a lonely blogger carving out a corner of the blogosphere and producing content for a handful of friends and family is a common one in the West, particularly in the United States. The situation in Korea, though, is somewhat different. Whereas dedicated blogging services such as Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad are the norm in the United States, the majority of blogs in Korea use portal-based services. Even the newer dedicated blogging services, Tistory and Egloos, are owned by Internet portal companies or their parent companies (the former is owned by Daum and the latter is owned by SK Communications, which also operates Nate and CyWorld).
For bloggers in Korea, this situation provides a ready-made community at their fingertips, making it much more likely that their content will be seen by viewers outside their small circle of friends. At any of the portal main pages you will find links to popular blog posts on the latest issues. Some portals make an extra effort to highlight good blogs. Naver, for example hands out yearly “power blog” awards in fields ranging from culture and entertainment to interior design and lifestyle.
Of course, the blogosphere would be little more than an elaborate echo chamber if the only readers were the bloggers themselves. Yet, even Koreans who do not have their own blogs will regularly read various blogs. The process starts with the home page of a typical portal site, such as Naver or Yahoo Korea. Enter a term or subject area into the search engine and up pop the results, which are grouped under categories, such as news items, general websites, blogs, and sponsored links.
Of particular note, after the paid and sponsored links, and any special features, the first category is generally “blogs.” Looking for a recipe for a Korean side dish for the dinner table? Want to find out what the man on the street thought about the latest hit film? Or maybe you are interested in taking up a sport, such as swimming or cycling. Chances are that someone in the blogosphere shares your interests and has written something about the target of your search. For Koreans, blogs are a treasure trove of information.
However, this attitude toward blogs is not universal. For example, in the United States, as the number of blogs increased, people worried about blogs clogging up search results. One university student even complained that blogs “masquerade as useful information when all they contain is idle chatter,” and “when a major political or social event happens, Google is noised to the brim with blogs and you have to start at result number 40 or so after passing over the blogs.” Shortly after Google acquired Blogger in 2003, this problem was addressed by creating a separate “blog search” page and removing the majority of blogs from the main search results. Compare this with Korea, where many readers favor the opinions of “citizen journalists,” on the latest news and events. It could be said that, even more so than elsewhere, the Korean blogosphere represents a true online democracy, where everyone is equally regarded and all voices have the same chance of being heard. Blogs have become as much a part of everyday life for tech-savvy Koreans as any other aspect of their information society.

Where Are We Headed?
Although the proliferation of portal-based blogs in Korea does help foster a sense of community and make blog content easier to access, this state of affairs is not without its drawbacks. Yi Gangseok, an IT consultant, self-proclaimed early adapter, and winner of AllBlog’s 2008 awards for Best New Blog and Best Science & Technology Blog, describes the limitations of a portal-based blogosphere: “Since portals have a very clear stance on corporate whistle blowers, consumer critiques of products, and political criticism, any inclinations users of these portal blogging services may have toward ‘citizen journalism’ are weakened.” He predicts that this conflict of interest between bloggers and the portal sites will continue, while suggesting that portals have the upper hand: “There is a good possibility that this conflict with bloggers will lead portals to define blogs as nothing more, and nothing less, than content producers.”
The future direction of blogs is difficult to predict. Still, there is no doubt that portal sites will continue to play an important role in Korea’s blogosphere, and if history has shown us anything, it is that the hopes and desires of the general public cannot be stifled forever. Korean history shows us many examples of ordinary citizens who have stood up for what they believe in. So, if enough bloggers feel strongly enough, we could see an evolution of the blogosphere as well. It may be something as simple as independent blogging services springing up to compete with the portal sites, or more bloggers might host blogs on their own domains.
Regardless of how the blogosphere may develop, one thing is certain: blogs have become an integral aspect of the Korean lifestyle. Just as people have long written journals to record their thoughts and letters to share experiences with friends and family, blogs are now a means for Koreans young and old to share pieces of themselves with others. They share as individuals, but in doing so they affirm that they are part of the Korean nation, and the tribe of humanity as a whole. Just as the blogs of today might look a little different from those of ten years ago, so might the blogs of ten years from now look different. Yet the common thread that binds all of these together, the need to share ourselves with the world and thus become part of that world, remains unbroken. In this way, blogs will continue to play a fundamental role in the lives of Koreans for years to come.