PKB

Sometimes, explaining Korea, where I was made and born, is hard.

I was born in Seoul. We moved when I was one to Guam (that’s another story, for another time). We settled in L.A. when I was nine, and I’ve lived in the Bay Area since I came up here for college.

Explaining Korea is hard here in the US because it doesn’t have the broadly spread pop-cultural or economic reference points of Japan or China.

Korea as a meme is getting more play, certainly here in Silicon Valley — cf., Cyworld, Samsung, fiber to the door, pro Starcraft leagues — but in the West, Korea is to Asia as The Silmarillion is to The Lord of the Rings: vaguely familiar, and known best only to those with an itch to dig into the culture.

Enough setup.

Over the weekend, Nicholas Reville invited me to a get together for Miro, where I met two folks who dropped new science on me about Korea and the Internet that’s worth sharing.

Jake Shapiro runs the Public Radio Exchange, an online marketplace for the distribution of public radio programming. Jake also plays guitar in a band called Two Ton Shoe. Two Ton Shoe formed in 2000, gigged on the East Coast, but didn’t break through in the US. In 2005, after the band had gone on hiatus, Jake was pinged by the owner of a Korean record label.

The record label owner wanted to release a CD of Two Ton Shoe’s greatest hits in Korea.

In the years since the band had gone on hiatus, they’d become, thanks to filesharing over the Internet, “a talisman for teenagers bearing black wool caps and guitar bags, tired of what they hear on the radio.” They planned a tour, and started negotiating a new album deal in Korea.

I’ve summarized most of the above bit from a wonderful Economist journal entitled “Flash memory and fetishism“, about a trip the author took to Seoul with Jake.

Among other vivid snapshots of Korea, circa 2007, is this excerpt, which manages to combine a language lesson, a shout out to Metallica, and a brief reference to growing up across cultures:

The guitar player, James, rips into something very like “Happy Birthday”. James, son of a Korean diplomat, grew up in a suburb of DC and had to learn his native language as a teenager when his family returned to South Korea. Among other jobs, James translates during the Seoul visits of Metallica, a heavy-metal band. When he is finished I can only repeat the phrase I’ve learned: “Chu gun da” - “That kills”.

I’ve written before about yearning for bridges between the online experience and meatspace. Jake’s story is about as happy an example as I could imagine about this happening.

I also learned from Rebecca Masisak, the co-CEO of CompuMentor, about The Beautiful Foundation, based in Seoul. They’ve created something called “The Happy Bean.” It’s a web app running now on Naver, Korea’s top search engine, that lets non-governmental organizations (NGOs) set up blogs about their work and lets individuals in turn donate to NGOs they learn about through Happy Bean. I don’t have a ton more info than this, but Rebecca told me that a couple of the projects at this year’s Netsquared conference were building services similar to The Happy Bean.

Aside: The Happy Bean. I just love that name. It’s got to be good.

I haven’t blogged much about Korea before. Lots more to share before and during my trip back to the motherland in September.

If you only have three minutes to spare, and want to get a quick dose of Korea Fighting^TM, check these out:

Next Wednesday, July 11, at 2pm PDT/9pm GMT, we’ll be relaunching Air Mozilla. Read more on what to expect over at Asa’s blog.

The live webcast requires the Flash player 9 plugin (for Windows, Mac OS or Linux) to be installed to view the video stream. For a number of reasons, I’m less than happy about requiring the use of a proprietary piece of software on the client end to experience the webcast. Because we know not everyone who’s interested in the interview has Flash installed, we’ll be quickly archiving and making available the recorded webcast in multiple formats, including Theora, shortly after the live webcast.

The webcast solution we’re using for the relaunch of Air Mozilla supports about 800 simultaneous streams, and allows us to intercut the live webcast with pre-recorded content from a web-based control panel. That said - we’re not committed longterm to any single solution, and we’re very interested in hearing from folks who know of open source webcasting solutions that we can also assess for future Air Mozilla shows.

Chris Double’s ongoing work to add <video> element support in Firefox is moving us forward to the day that we can all watch webcasts in our browsers with no proprietary plugins required. In the meantime we’re looking forward to re-introducing Air Mozilla next week, and hope you’ll join us.

It’s been a long while since I’ve been in any sort of regular concert mode. I’m trying to get my concert legs back this summer.

July 17, Katya and I will be heading out to catch The Polyphonic Spree at the Great American Music Hall with friends. The GAMH is hands down one of the most beautiful venues to see music in San Francisco.

August 24, I’m solo but will be hooking up with Seth Bindernagel and John Slater for the Wilco show at the Greek Theater in Berkeley.

Looking forward to a great summer for live music. Friends at and outside Mozilla: come along for the ride! The water is fine.