In a K-pop-heavy round-up of Korean tech/social media blogs:
- Bloter.net has an interview with Joyce Kim, who after a stellar academic career (Cornell, Harvard, law school) decided to ditch her job as a lawyer and start up Soompi.com, a site aimed at making Korean films, soap operas and pop music more accessible to English speakers. The article begins with some observations about how hard it is, language issues aside, for foreigners to access sites offering Korean dramas and K-pop music (Korea’s real-name registration system, Korean sites’ insistence on using Internet Explorer, and the dearth of English-language sites in the US).
Kim says her site now gets more than 1.2 million hits a month (of whom only 10 percent are Korean) and that Korean pop culture has enormous potential among American youngsters, who Kim reckons view Hollywood as increasingly stale. About the difficulties facing start-ups in Korea, Kim has this to say:
