Death of email in S. Korea

Interesting cultural perspective from South Korea. Email seen as overly-formal. Use is giving way to SMS and IM amongst the under-30s.

Remember: this is the country where broadband penetration is huge (and the bandwidth available to most homes is substantially higher than is typical in the US or UK). I used to work for one of the Samsung companies. It's an unusual culture: kind of Japanese, but less formal (perhaps deliberately so).

(For "mini-homepages," perhaps we should read, "blogs"?)

This from Chosun...

The email era is coming to an end because replacement communication means such as Internet messengers, mini-homepages (dubbed "one-man media"), and SMS are wielding their power. As a consequence, the stronghold of email, once the favorite of the Internet, is being shaken from its roots.

The ebbing of email is a phenomenon peculiar to Korea, an IT power. Leading the big change, unprecedented in the world, are our teens and those in their 20's. The perception that "email is an old and formal communication means" is rapidly spreading among them. "I use email when I send messages to elders," said a college student by the name of Park. For 22-year-old office worker Kim, "I use email only for receiving cellphone and credit card invoices."

A poll conducted by Chungbuk University computer education professor Lee Ok-hwa on over 2,000 middle, high school and college students in Gyeonggi and Chungcheong provinces in October revealed that more than two-thirds of the respondents said, "I rarely use or don't use e-mail at all."

The reasons given for shunning email are that it's impossible to tell whether an addressee has received a message right away and replies are not immediately forthcoming. Still another reason is that you send messages through SMS or messenger as if you were playing a game, while doing so through email makes you feel as if you are doing homework or performing a task. "The new generation hate agonizing and waiting and tend to express their feelings immediately," said Professor Lee. "The decline of email is a natural outcome reflecting such characteristics of the new generation."

The ebb of email is confirmed by a diminishing trend in pageviews, a tabulation of frequency in service used by email users. Daum Communication, the top email business in the country, saw its email service pageviews fall over 20 percent from 3.9 billion in October last year to 3 billion in October this year. By contrast, with SK Telecom, the nation's No. 1 communication firm, monthly SMS transmissions skyrocketed over 40 percent in October from 2.7 billion instances last October. Cyworld, a representative mini-homepage firm, witnessed its pageviews multiply over 26-fold from 650 million instances in October last year to 17 billion in October this year.

"Email's efficiency falls in terms of promptness, convenience and credibility," observed Yoo Hyon-ok, president, SK Communications. "With the continuous emergence of new communication means, communication formats will develop further in the future."

(Kim Ki-hong, dama90@chosun.com)

In defence of Lycos Europe's anti-spam screensaver

Sigh. Dunno about you, but I'm getting fed up reading breathless "comment" that Lycos Europe is DDOS'ing spammers. How dumb do you think these guys are? Do I smell Americans believing that nothing good could possibly come from Cheese-Eating Surrender-Monkeys? Oh surely not.

Let's say it again: Lycos Europe's position is that the cooperative screensaver system monitors the response times of the webservers, endeavouring to throttle the hits sent so as not to shut them down. Not to mention shutting down other, legitimate sites hosted on the same servers.

Here's another example of people fundamentally misunderstanding this attempt: Mr. Kulawiec, like others, doesn't seem to understand what Lycos is trying to do...

From: Rich Kulawiec rsk@...org
Date: November 29, 2004 9:56:33 AM EST
Subject: Lycos gets into the denial-of-service attack business

It's hard to know where to even begin trying to explain how terribly misguided this is, so I'll just confine myself to noting that trying to win a bandwidth contest with spammers -- who have an unlimited supply of it at zero cost -- reflects a stunning ignorance of reality.

The point is to eat up the bandwidth allowance of spamvertised webservers. This will either quickly shut them down, or cost the spammers a lot of money in additional bandwidth charges. Spammers' websites do not have "an infinite amount of bandwidth". Perhaps you're confusing e-commerce webservers with MTAs?

How to attract attention to your eBay auction

...use an eyecatching gallery picture ;-)
Posted by Hello

The Forgotten Battle of Herouville

For the past few weeks, I've been keyboard-jockeying for my Pa, who's been editing this book, called The Forgotten Battle of Herouville, by Edward Dunstan. It details the D-Day Operation Charnwood from the perspective of The Lincolnshire Regiment (later to be known as The Royal Lincolnshire Regiment). The book got officially published on Thursday, at the final officers' dinner club meeting.

Pa was in the Lincolns, but later on, in Malaya (as t'was then). Capt. Jennings was the Intelligence Officer [sniggers].

Ulimately, the book will be on Edward's site, but its temporary home is here.

Make Love, Not Spam

An interesting idea: Seti@Home-style harrasment of spammers.

However, do we really trust Lycos to pull this off? Remember, these are the guys who after 12 months, still email me even though they swear blind that I don't have an account with them any longer...