What's real in Korea?

Paul Conley directed me towards Dan Gilmors Blog and I immediately focused on this post. He gets quickly to the point that things work in Korea a bit more differently that many of us think on a first look. It's worth scratching the surface there to work out what is really happening. Interesting place:

Korea Bloggers, Press Freedoms: "In one of the most connected places on the planet, blogging is thriving. But it's just one of many forms of online communication.

Last evening Joi Ito and I joined a small group of Korean bloggers at a local restaurant.

I had to leave the party early, but I learned a bit about the local scene. Koreans are taking to the blog format, but they do it differently. For example, linking out isn't as common as with U.S. bloggers, who make it a practice to point to other people's material. I'm still not sure why this is the case.

The day before yesterday, I stopped off at OhmyNews, the pathbreaking site that combines citizen journalism with professional standards. How? They edit the articles, or at least many of them. They work with the citizen reporters, with fact-checking and training sessions.

The major newspapers are obviously not fond of OhmyNews, which was created in part as a counterweight to their overwhelming influence. The country's president, Roh Moo-hyun, took a shot at the Korean press in a speech Monday, when he officially welcomed members of the global newspaper industry to the nation for several conferences including the World Editors Forum conference that brought me here.

Korea has a new press law. I'm not entirely sure, even after speaking with a number of local experts, that I understand it well enough to comment intelligently. But it seems to be a fairly direct attack on the power of the major newspapers and other dominant media, and it has generated pushback from the press in a general sense.

I'm no fan of media concentration. I'm even less of a fan of overt government interference in journalism.

The advent of a serious online media here is good news for all Koreans. It will be more difficult to control, by whatever means."

(Via Dan Gillmor's blog.)