I Note and Share, Therefore I Am

“ㅡㅡ Sometimes I cannot communicate with others in Korean.” (www.me2day.net user ID “Coolzack”)

“Cleaning nursing bottles is so hard. ㅠ.ㅠ”(www.playtalk.net user ID “Total happiness”)

These are short memos written on a blog site, where posting are mostly single lines. Albeit brief, everyone agrees on the simple comments. As such, web services for sharing Internet postings and memos are gaining traction in cyberspace.

Going through an evolution from diaries posts to Windows’ memo function, memo became something readily accessible via the Internet and able to be shared with friends from afar. The aforementioned memo sites aim for “sharing,” one of the keywords in Web 2.0, moving beyond just simple writing. In other words, sharing thoughts and opinions on memos is an objective in itself. On such services, an official in the Internet industry referred to “service that highlights online collaboration.”

Planning and Organizing in Web-

Recently, NCsoft Openmaru Studio showcased “Spring note,” a personal information management web note service. It is an online notebook where users can write and manage things with their friends.

Anyone can post upon logging onto the site, and edit them with invited friends. Couples or individuals can run their own sites through the service. Sample planning devices such as “finals preparation planning” or “travel itinerary” are also available.

Openmaru explains that the service is convenient especially for college students writing a group report or employees working on a team project. Some elementary school students even wrote a fantasy novel with their pals using the service together.

“Lifepod (http://lifepod.co.kr),” which runs a beta version service, enables people to share schedules by marking plans on an online calendar. It can be used personally, but a team or family can also share their schedules and plans.

Addictive Single-line Blog-

Recently, single-line blogs such as Me2day and Playtalk have been in fashion.

In these sites, people express their opinions in a line or two, unlike common blogs with long postings. People cannot write more than 150 characters at a time.

Some bloggers even complain that the number of postings on traditional blogs has significantly dropped due to the popularity of these sites.

Some commend the service as an alternative to heavy and serious blogs. The sites offer a service that compiles what the user posts every early morning in a blog, and possibly transfer postings altogether to other sites in the future.

There is a social book marking site called “Margarine,” which has a function similar to the “Favorites” as seen on Internet web browser.

Related industry sources said that the rise of memo sites has to do with net users’ resistance to bloated portal services.

sublime@donga.com