Google to Korea: Show Yourself on the Web

It’s hard to believe that anybody with a Web site would not want use a global search engine to attract attention to it. But then, the South Korean government isn’t anybody.

One of the strange hangovers of the let’s-block-competitors-and-do-everything-ourselves mentality that is thankfully declining in South Korea is that when government agencies were building Web sites in the 1990s and early 2000s, they blocked access to global search engines.

Part of the thinking, no doubt, was that this would cause South Koreans to favor local search engines rather than the global players like Google and Yahoo. South Korea-based Naver and Daum do dominate the nation’s Web search market and control its online advertising market.

South Korean companies, driven by the commercial imperative of trying to snag as many eyeballs and users to their Web offerings as possible, long ago made sure their Web sites could be seen, indexed and prioritized by global search engines. And when there’s a big news story in either of the Koreas, we’ve noticed that some South Korean media organizations have become skilled at optimizing their headlines and story placement to draw attention to themselves on the news pages of Google, Yahoo and Bing.

In recent months, Google has stepped up its effort to persuade holdout South Korean Web sites to let its search robot crawl their sites, index their pages and present them to users of the Google search engine.

On Monday night, one of Google’s top engineers, Matt Cutts, gave a presentation to about 80 government officials, attorneys, webmasters and journalists to illustrate the problem. “If a country turns away from the open Web, it risks turning into an island,” Mr. Cutts said.

A South Korean newspaper last month carried a story with a list that showed near half of the government’s web sites blocked access to search engines. Among the quickest to change after that article was the presidential web site, although the Blue House web gurus still haven’t figured out how to maximize their exposure as a search for “President Lee Myung-bak” on Google, Yahoo and Bing still returns his Wikipedia biography first.

Mr. Cutts dismissed concerns that hackers might find their way to Korean Web sites via Google’s search engine. He noted that hackers tend to target Web sites by using IP address numbers rather than domain names.

And when a reporter suggested Korea’s search engines do a better job of protecting privacy than Google, Mr. Cutts replied that Google has developed many tools to help webmasters identify whether private information is appearing on their site.

One of those in the audience was Kang Min-koo, a senior judge in the Seoul High Court. When he saw the court’s Web site was on Mr. Cutts’ list of government sites that couldn’t be indexed by Google – and thus couldn’t be found on a Google search – he sent a text message by phone to the court’s webmaster ordering it to be changed.

Since the change can be made by altering just a few lines of software code, the webmaster had it done in no time. When it came time for questions, Mr. Kang asked Mr. Cutts to check if the High Court’s site showed up on Google – and it did.

“That’s amazing,” Mr. Cutts said, calling it an example of South Korea’s “balli balli,” or hurry-up, culture and promising to use the experience in future speeches.

When an attorney from one of the country’s most prominent firms asked if other countries also blocked Google from listing their Web sites, Mr. Cutts said South Korea was unique among the developed, prominent countries of the world as “one of the few that has done more blocking.”

Of course, the issue is a competitive one for Google. If it can’t deliver prominent Korean web sites in its search engine, Koreans or people who are interested in Korean content are less likely to use Google.

Mr. Cutts appealed to the vanity and pride of those in his audience in his appeal. “If Korea opens up a little bit more, more people will realize how important it is,” he said.

That’s true on so many levels of society and in so many facets of business that it’s just part of the conventional wisdom among foreigners who live and work in South Korea – and just another example of why Korea wasn’t called the Hermit Kingdom for nothing.

MediaFire: We're not pirates like Megaupload

Closing Megaupload for piracy made an impact. Some file sharing services are retreating, but MediaFire says they have nothing to worry about.

That's the news from MediaFire CEO Derek Labian in an interview in VentureBeat. "We don't have a business built on copyright infringement," says Labian. He also slammed Megaupload for "making a ridiculous amount of money with ridiculously bad service," noting the closed file sharing provider allowed people to upload free but charged for large downloads, and paid pirates for content.

[ Free download: 6 things every IT person should know ]

Yet the news of MediaFire's denouncing Megaupload for promoting piracy, while claiming themselves to be "a legitimate business targeting professionals," caught many by surprise. Also surprising to users? That Labian announced MediaFire how closely he works with the feds, including, "Homeland Security, ICE, and the FBI." This could just be part of complying with various official requests to remove content challenged by copyright holders, but many worry the cooperation goes further.

Yeah, right

I always thought Mediafire would've been the first to go, honestly.
Erik Ziedses Des Plantes on prefixmag.com

lol. Who's this guy trying kid here? While they don't have an incentive for users pirating crap, the service is clearly used for it.
StupidPeopleShouldntBreed on venturebeat.com

About a year ago I filed DMCA takedown notices to just about every one of these sites on behalf of an artist I represented. MediaFire was the *only* website to ignore that request, and the pirated files are still there.
tunelab.com on venturebeat.com

Pirates bein' pirates

thank god it looks like they'll be safe. I need to get episode downloads SOMEWHERE!
laurenhowes on livejournal.com

MegaUpload's loss is MediaFire's gain?
Dave Park on prefixmag.com

i was in the middle of getting the whole BBC shakespeare collection and then fileserve died ughhhhhhhhhhhh
xhoney_bee on livejournal.com

This is the file storage business

People use Ford trucks to haul illicit substances around - should Ford be quaking in their boots?
dave on venturebeat.com

So let me ask you, if 80% of all Ford Trucks are used destroy others property, does it makes sense to question the legitimate use of Ford Trucks?
Steven Noyes on venturebeat.com

Just because they don't see themselves in the same space as Megaupload doesn't mean the Justice Department feels the same way. Move those servers!
ani_di_franco on livejournal.com

Can any file hosting service that offers free space really be sure of their user's intentions?

MediaFire CEO: Unlike Megaupload, our business model isn’t built on piracy

As the strange case of file-sharing site Megaupload continues to unfold, many wonder if the federal government will begin to clamp down on similar sites that function like Megaupload, with easy sharing and hosting of copyrighted files.

Already, two well-known file-sharing services, Uploaded.to and Filesonic have disabled several features of their sites this weekend because of the Megaupload scandal. Others are sure to follow.

But Derek Labian, CEO of popular cloud-based file-hosting site MediaFire, told VentureBeat in an interview today that he isn’t too concerned about the government going after his company because, unlike Megaupload, MediaFire doesn’t incentivize piracy.

“We don’t have a business built on copyright infringement.” Labain said. “Like many other cloud-based sharing services like Box.net and Dropbox, we’re a legitimate business targeting professionals.”

When it comes to Megaupload, Labian described Kim Dotcom and his organization as “shady” and said the $175 million in revenues the company made should give people pause. He noted that Megaupload’s structure gave users monetary rewards for uploading pirated content. Users of the service could upload without a cap but users who want to download a large file (or download it faster) would have to pay for it. Those who uploaded the best files would be given free account upgrades or even cash.

“Megaupload was making a ridiculous amount of money with a ridiculously bad service,” Labian said. “We frankly don’t see ourselves in the same space.”

A little more background on MediaFire: The privately funded company out of Woodlands, Tex. was founded in 2006 and has steadily offered better ways to host and share large files. Because it offers an incredibly easy to way to share 200MB files for free with other people, the company has attracted employees at 86 percent of the Fortune 500 for sending files that are too large for e-mail. It offers unlimited downloads and file storage, and if you want to upload larger files with long-term storage, you can pay $9 a month for a Pro account or $49 a month for a Business account.

But the company’s free file-sharing solution can also be used easily for sharing copyrighted files, especially music, with friends, relatives or anyone on the web. A Google search for a song name, an artist name and “MediaFire,” for example, will likely bring you to a copy of that file that can easily be downloaded from a MediaFire page.

When asked about the Googling issue, Labian said that MediaFire is a “private service” and the only reason Google indexes a MediaFire page is when it has been shared by a user on a third-party site. He said MediaFire isn’t at fault for this and said Google should look into the issue.

“We try to steer clear of things that would attract scrutiny,” Labian said. “If people are pirating on our service, we don’t want those people to use it.”

Another reason Labian said he wasn’t worried about the government stepping in is because the company maintains a “good relationship” with various government bodies, including “Homeland Security, ICE, and the FBI.” Following DMCA protocols, whenever MediaFire is notified of a copyrighted file being shared inappropriately, the company immediately takes it down.

As for the future, MediaFire is optimistic about what’s to come. Labian said the company has been working for a year on its next set of products, which will emphasize collaboration and focus on business users. He teased what was coming by saying that cloud storage providers Box.net and Dropbox significantly disrupted the cloud storage space, but MediaFire would do it next.

“This is a tough market to be in, but we’re constantly looking to innovate,” Labian said. “Sharing will always be important, but it’s not the only important aspect for our customers.”

Tumblr vs Pinterest

In the left corner, the blog platform weighing in at 15 billion monthly pageviews, and in the right, the social photo sharing site with 11 million monthly pageviews. (In case you don't know, here is a good intro to Pinterest.) They seem pretty different right? Wrong.

Well, kind of wrong. Tumblr is still a blogging platform - as much as you can use it as a loose collection of inspiration it still vaguely resembles a blog - while Pinterest is most definitely a photo sharing/inspiration site. They definitely do compete though - lots of people use Tumblr like Pinterest, as a place to collect hundreds of images for inspiration, categories with tags. They also "ReBlog" like crazy (duplicate another users' posts quickly and easily,) which is identical to Pinterest's "RePin" feature. They might use the more traditional blogging features occasionally - but they could deal without them. I kind of fit into this category.

Pinterest knocks Tumblr out of the park when it comes to posting an image from somewhere else online - where most people find their content. They both have bookmarklets to share content, but Tumblr's is hidden away whereas you are prompted to use Pinterest's. Tumblr's bookmarklet is powerful - and can share much more than just images - but is kind of cumbersome, as in, to make sure I am posting the right image I always have to right-click get image url, then paste that in before typing in my tag. Pinterest's bookmarklet only picks out large images so I can just click the picture I want - and I can choose what category (essentially the same as a tag) to use from a dropdown menu. It definitely makes socially sharing an image much easier.

It kind of feels like Pinterest saw what people were using Tumblr for and decided to strip it down and do it better. Tumblr will take anything you throw at it - pictures, video, quotes, text, links, photosets - Pinterest will take pictures and kind of video. Tumblr encourages user-generated content, and lots of people use Tumblrs as their portfolios or personal photoblogs; Pinterest states that it is not all a self-promotion tool. Tumblr lets you change your theme completely - until your blog is so far removed from a Tumblr blog the only thing that gives it away is the top right follow button - whereas Pinterest has a nice default grid design (reminds me of the Tumblr Archive) that you can't change.

Currently I use both, but I'm late to the game with Pinterest, and mostly use Tumblr. This is partly comfort, partly that I do enjoy the traditional blogging features, and partly that all my friends use Tumblr and I have invested a lot of time into the 6140 posts on my Tumblr. I think there is space for these sites to coexist, but they are definitely competing on some levels. I don't have the space to compare some other aspects - how Pinterest drives wishlist/purchasing and how it is apparently just for girls, and how different each site's dashboard is - but they are definitely important.

Which do you prefer?

Tumblr Jumps to 15B Page Views a Month

In five years, Tumblr has gone from a relatively unknown micro-blogging platform to a giant of the social media world.

The site now garners 120 million unique users and 15 billion page views every month, Tumblr's founder and CEO David Karp said on Monday at the Digital Life Design (DLD) Conference in Munich, according to a report from The Next Web. Four months ago, the company said it received 13 billion page views a month and had 30 million blogs.

To date, more than 560 million people have viewed content on Tumblr, Karp said. U.S. users make up most of the site's traffic, with 45 percent or 249 million visitors to its networks coming from America. Forty nine million visitors come from Brazil, while 34 million come from the United Kingdom.

Tumblr use has skyrocketed in the last year in the U.S. alone, from 6.9 million unique U.S. visitors in November 2010 to 15.9 million a year later, according to comScore. Moreover, the site's nearly 42 million microblogs are re-blogged an average of nine times, significantly expanding the site's reach across the Web.

The re-blog function, "is like the Twitter re-tweets," Karp told in an interview earlier this month. "Something goes up on my blog, you love it, you can rip it out, put it on your blog while giving me attribution."

When asked why Tumblr has exploded in the last year, Karp pointed to "the fact that we attracted this really extraordinary group of creators."

"You're not really limited to your friends network," he continued. "Not that a friends network is a bad thing, but [who] you follow on Tumblr are not the people you know in real life, necessarily. There are random people on the other side of the planet who are kind of like-minded and who are really interesting to look at the world through their eyes. Sometimes it's celebrities who are doing really cool stuff. Sometimes it's an indie band or an indie filmmaker who's just posting about their process in a way that's totally compelling."

Tumblr differs from its blogging counterparts in that it specializes not in the long-form posts that can be found on Blogger or WordPress, but in media-driven posts that often include a link to a song, a photograph, or a YouTube clip instead of lengthy commentary.

The company's success has not been without headaches, like lengthy outages, however. Karp told PCMag that Tumblr has spent the last six months making improvements to the site to avoid similar problems in 2012. The company also recently introduced Fan Mail, a private messaging system for Tumblr users.

"We've always taken this position that we want to be very different from all of these [other social media] platforms," he said. "And if not different then actually very complementary. One way to describe it is where traditionally blogging was hearing my editorial voice, Tumblr is much more looking through my eyes."

WordPress Plugin Unblocks Censored Sites, Including The Pirate Bay

A new WordPress plugin makes it dead easy to uncensor blocked websites. In just a few clicks people can setup their own proxy site with the popular blogging software. An essential tool for people whose speech is restricted by oppressive regimes, and handy for downloaders in The Netherlands, Italy, Finland and other countries where ISPs are blocking The Pirate Bay. Additionally, the plugin partially defeats the PIPA and SOPA bills in the US.

There’s been a lot of talk about censorship lately. Last week the Internet witnessed the largest protest in its history, against the Internet censorship bills PIPA and SOPA. And earlier this month ISPs in Finland and the Netherlands were ordered to censor The Pirate Bay.

Alongside the millions who protest against these increasing censorship initiatives, there’s also a group of people who come up with ways to route around it. One of these projects is the RePress plugin for WordPress.

The plugin is developed by the hosting company Greenhost and allows everyone with a WordPress blog to start a proxy for sites that are censored elsewhere in the world. As an example, Greenhost have setup a Pirate Bay and Wikileaks proxy.

“By adding this plug-in to your WordPress website it will start functioning as a proxy and uncensor any blocked website you’d like,” Greenhost explains. “The only thing you’ll need is a WordPress website and the ability to install new plug-ins. After that you can maintain a list of websites you’d like to keep open freely available on the web.”

One of the main motivations for the plugin’s developers was to provide people in the Netherlands full access to The Pirate Bay when the recent court order is enforced. However, if SOPA or PIPA pass there might also be a need for people in the US to have a tool like this.

“We hope people outside Holland use the plug-in to uncensor piratebay.org, as it is in danger of being blocked in our country after a court-ruling. In the Netherlands we could then uncensor websites for people in oppressive regimes like Iran, Syria or the US after SOPA is passed.”

“[SOPA and PIPA] are said to defend the interests of the Entertainment industry, but will mainly cause grave and undeniable damage to the Open and Free web and all of its users: from the end-consumer to the cutting edge developers and inventors. Our aim is to make this impossible,” the Greenhost team notes.

Although the plugin can’t prevent domain names from being seized, it is indeed a good solution to bypass all of the common blocking measures that are used today.

The RePress initiative is applauded by several politicians, including European Parliament member Marietje Schaake. “This is a fantastic opportunity for human rights activists and a solution for people who face technological censorship and repression,” she told Webwereld.

To those eager to start their own proxy of blocked websites, RePress can be downloaded in the WordPress repository.

Google+ Now Open for Teens With Some Safeguards

When Google launched Google+ in June, 2010, it was for adults only. Now it's open to anyone 13 or older. The reason Google kept teens off the service at first is not because the social network was ever about what we euphemistically call "adult content," but because Google wanted to take extra time to get it right before opening the doors to people under 18.

After several months of testing, Google thinks it's reached a good balance. In rolling out the teen welcome mat, Bradley Horowitz, Google's Product VP for Google+ said, "We want to help teens build meaningful connections online. We also want to provide features that foster safety alongside self-expression. Today we're doing both, for everyone who's old enough for a Google Account (13 in most countries)."

Before opening Google+ for teens, Google consulted with child safety and teen safety experts including ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization where I serve as co-director along with Anne Collier. And to help parents better understand Google+, Anne Collier and I wrote A Parents Guide to Google+ and helped Google with its new Google+ Teen Safety Guide.

For the most part, teens' experience on Google+ will be just like adults, but there are some special safeguards for users under 18. Google didn't put any major breaks on teens -- it's giving them plenty of freedom to express themselves to their friends or even to the world, but it did make some of the default settings for teens more restrictive than for adults. If teens (or adults) decide to change them, they can, but how a service sets its defaults is very important. It's a type of recommendation -- the company's way of saying "this is how we think most people should use our service," and -- besides -- most people never get around to changing defaults.

Circular logic

Everyone on Google+ is encouraged to create circles where they group their friends and other contacts. You could have a circle of just family members, another circle of schoolmates and another circle of people on your soccer team. You can have as many circles as you want and you can call the circles whatever you want to call them. People in your circles are notified, but don't know the name of the circle(s) you've put them in. And it's asynchronous. You can be one of my circles, but you don't have to put me in any of yours. In that case, you'd see what I post to circles you're in but I'd only see what you post to the public, unless you added me to one of your circles.

Circles work the same for teens as they do for adults, but there are some special safeguards consisting of warnings and different default settings.

Safeguards for teens

1. If teens post something directed to extended circles or the public, they'll get a warning reminding them that "when you share to your extended circles, people you haven't added to your circles will be able to view your post and may be able to comment."
2. All Google+ users can control "who can notify me." For adults, the default is "anyone," but for teens the default is people in their circles. Adults can make their settings more restrictive and teens can make theirs more open, but the default for teens is designed to limit who can contact them.
3. By default, anyone can comment on an adult's public posts, but for teens it's only people in their circles.
4. There are also some differences in the profile defaults. Your profile is where others can see a bit about who you are and who you interact with on Google+. By default, employment and Education can be seen by anyone (Public) if you're an adult, but for teens, the default is "just your circles."
5. Adults' "Relationship Status" can be seen by people in their extended circles, but only in "your circles" for teens.
6. In the hang-out feature, up to 10 people can have a video chat. For teens if someone outside any of their circles joins in, the teen is temporarily pulled out of the hangout and asked if they want to continue. It's a way of pausing the action for a second and encouraging the teen to think about whether he or she wants to remain in this hangout.

The precautions that Google put into place will help remind teens about safe and appropriate use of Google+ but, as my ConnectSafely co-director Anne Collier pointed out in a blog post, "Just as with most protections and any services on the social Web, these are not about control. Users choose to go with the defaults -- or not." And even services that have strict controls can't always enforce them. "There's always a workaround even for the strictest safeguards any parent or site might impose," said Collier, "including software that disallows social networking sites altogether."

Disclosure: Larry Magid serves as co-director of ConnectSafely.org, which receives financial support from Google, Facebook and other social media companies.