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SK Communications president Yoo Hyun-oh attempted to nail down the will-o-the-wisp that is Web 2.0, the much-touted next stage of the Internet. ¡°Web 2.0 is philosophy,¡± Yoo mused. ¡°At the center of it are openness and sharing through which many nameless individual users make Web 2.0 more powerful.¡± He will be a keynote speaker at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in November.
He said its architects ¡°picked the most successful Internet business model after the IT bubble burst and named it Web 2.0. I think that it is a combined form of the merits of successful IT companies like Google and Amazon.¡±
The basic feature of Web 2.0 will be to let users create and build up content, including applications, that other Internet surfers can share. SK Communications¡¯ own personal homepage service Cyworld typifies the characteristic, he said. The company does not operate Cyworld -- its customers do.
Yoo said Korea is ahead of the U.S. in planning appealing services for Web 2.0. ¡°We have the world¡¯s best capability to create attractive, customer-friendly websites,¡± Yoo said. But technology and scale are the problems.
¡°For example, Google can search a tremendous amount of information for a second and display what people want on the monitor. We can¡¯t catch up with Google in this technology. The scale of thought is also different from ours. Let¡¯s take the Google Map Service as an example. It is amazing for Google to think of photographing the world with satellites and putting the places into its directory. It was actually able to finance the plan. The huge scale of the market has led to a grand idea,¡± he said.
But Yoo warns Web 2.0 could become another IT bubble. ¡°The situation seems similar to the previous bubble in the early 2000s. These days, the value of companies soars if they have the word ¡®Web 2.0¡¯ in their name, although no financial gain from it is in sight. During the IT bubble era, companies with the word ¡®dot.com¡¯ in their name shot up.¡± Yoo believes a new Internet culture and regulations corresponding to the Web 2.0 age are necessary. ¡°There must be a rule against some Internet users¡¯ plagiarizing postings uploaded by others. Someone who creates something new deserves a reward. The copyright law should be revised in line with the changing times.¡±
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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