South Korean search engine Naver.com announced the release of Opencast this Sunday March 1st. I had a brief introduction by an Naver employee about the new feature. In short, Opencast can be best described as a widget showing random blogposts with a Twitter-like subscription function. (get it?) Ah, well… Perhaps you should see the video for an impression, or at least to see how slick the admin panel looks.
Naver.com has over 150 million views per day, the fact that they are tapping user generated content and displaying it on their frontpage is an interesting development.
How it works for publisher a ‘Opencaster’:
- ‘Opencasters’ post their content on their blog/site/etc.
- They visit an admin panel on naver.com to login
- Add text (excerpt) and/or pictures with their link
- Their post get displayed in random during an X amount of time on the website
How it works for reader:
- People visiting the site see the headlines on the page
- Click through or subscribe (after login) to certain posts
- Get displayed same or simular headlines in the future
I like the idea because it’s like integrating a meaningful public timeline into a page as popular as Google, and I am a firm believer that a western equilavent would be a big hit.
The video is narrorated in Korean but should offer some idea of the service.
Naver.com
According to the December ’08 issue of KoreanClick, South Korean search engine Naver accounts for 75% of the total Internet searching activity in Korea, leaving Google with a mere 3%. Perhaps because the search engine company defines search in this country. Read more about Naver…