By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Are the Internet and the newspaper friends or foes?
This tiresome question has been evoked yet again as Naver (www.naver.com), the country's most popular Web site, plans to bring dramatic changes to its main page upon the New Year.
Their idea is to provide users with a personalized homepage to check news, e-mail, blog postings, entertainment features and other content all in one place.
Their new design is generating excitement among bloggers, who are now given a bigger and more effective platform to feed their insatiable hunger for hits. However, news organizations, wary of their declining influence in news circulation, can't seem to agree on whether to welcome or to condemn Naver's changing of the house rules.
NHN, the company that operates Naver, on Monday unveiled the open beta version of its Web portal's new main page, which makes its official debut on Jan. 1.
The refurbished facade can be seen as Naver's answer to Google's (www.google.co.kr) iGoogle start page. The news section in the main page will be replaced by ``News Cast,'' which allows media outlets to offer direct links to their Internet pages, unlike the older model, which had Naver editors sort and place the news stories themselves.
To maximize user-generated content for traffic, Naver is also introducing ``Open Cast,'' a section enabling bloggers to customize their blog subscriptions and providing bloggers with a bigger platform to publish and share their content.
The revamped Web portal has a section called ``time square,'' where users can get stock, weather, traffic and sports updates and other real-time information. Users can also gather their frequently used services on Naver's new ``menu bar.''
The changes have gathered lots of attention in the Internet industry where Naver enjoys undisputed status as South Korea's No. 1 portal and search engine, giving NHN nearly 80 percent of the country's search market.
Naver's efforts to renew its Web page represents the latest focus among Internet companies - to utilize user-generated content to secure more traffic.
Daum (www.daum.net), the No. 2 portal, enjoyed increased popularity over the past year thanks to the success of its ``Tistory'' blog services and ``Blogger News'' section, which had A-list bloggers publishing news stories and features in an online magazine format.
Although NHN is declining to comment specifically on the scope of its expectations for Open Cast, industry watchers believe that the user-centered publishing model may eventually provide new opportunities for Naver in social networking services, a sector dominated by its rival site, Cyworld (www.cyworld.com).
``The idea is to allow Naver users to customize the main pages based on their own user habits,'' said Cho Su-young, director of NHN's creative marketing and design division.
``Through the open beta test, we expect to get feedback from users and fine-tune the new services. Naver is visited by more than 17 million users a day, so we might get valuable information,'' he said.
Bloggers obviously have high hopes for Naver's Open Cast services, as exposure to Naver's main page could easily draw hundreds of thousands of hits a day.
Media outlets, on the other hand, are receiving News Cast with a mixed reaction.
It could be said that News Cast is a product of the past uneasy relationship between Naver and the news organizations, which had been complaining that the Internet company was wielding too much power in the shaping of public opinion by dominating the distribution of news stories, despite not producing content itself.
Tired of the conflict, NHN chief executive Choi Hwi-young announced earlier this year that the portal will be giving up its rights to edit news stories, and will provide direct links to the Internet sites of the newspapers and television networks instead.
However, NHN continued to feud with newspapers over the number of media outlets to be exposed through News Cast.
Member companies of the Online Media News (www.onlinemedianews.co.kr), an industry lobby, had threatened to boycott the News Cast service after NHN announced plans to limited the number of exposed news outlets to 14 companies. NHN compromised in the end, expanding the list to 34, although refusing to include specialist magazines and industry journals.
However, the conflict between the print media and the country's biggest Internet company is perhaps as lopsided as a Pyongyang election. The Internet has changed the way people get information and entertainment, and traditional media outlets are now relying on portals like Naver to secure readership.
And, as seen by the success of Daum's Blogger News and other decentralized platforms, news organizations are struggling to compete with information delivered by unregulated, peer-to-peer models.