DIY in Korea?

Joi Ito is in Korea, reporting on the blogging sitution there. In spite of the world's most widespread broadband (much broader than we have here in the U.S.), most blogging (or activities similar to blogging) takes place in walled gardens provided by large companies. From what I gather, the walls have a few doors, but not the wide-open qualities of hyperlinked journals (including those provided by hosting services) that we find elsewhere in the world. Joi explains:

Generally speaking, it sounded like people don't link very much. They are still mostly plain html and not css + xhtml. There seemed to be some trackback implementation, but it is not yet as widely used as in the US or Japan. As far as I could tell, none of the blog systems used any of the standard APIs, and some had RSS feeds. Blogs and hompys don't seem to be pinging any pinger sites, which makes them nearly invisible to the outside world. In addition, many sites block search engine bots from crawling hompys and blogs.

It appears that one of the biggest problems is that there are several 800 pound gorilla type portals that remind me of AOL during it's powerful years. They try to create walled gardens of users. With millions of bloggers and hompy users in each community, they are focused more on integrating inside of their portals than open standards or linking across portals. There are some independent blog services and aggregators, but they still seem to be focused on community and somewhat inward facing networks. A not-so-visibile majority of blogs in Japan and the US are also this way, but the public facing citizen journalist or pundit-style blogs seem to be very sparse in Korea.

"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy," David Weinberger famously wrote. In that Cluetrain chapter, he named one of my favorite concepts, ever: Fort Business. He adds, Fort Business’s assumptions are being challenged by a meek little thing: a hyperlink.

For whatever reason — legal, technical, cultural — the companies providing blogging tools in Korea seem to have leveraged Fort Business into the blogosphere.

Makes me wonder if there's a reciprocal paucity of DIY. Like, I wonder how much Linux development is happening there. Or other free and open source efforts. How much is the demand side supplying itself inside various business forts, as they're doing in the U.S., Europe, Australia, India — and even (in some ways, especially) in China? How much, in Dave Winer's words, are the users becoming manufacturers while the manufacturers become users? I don't know. Maybe some of the rest of you do. If so, tell us about it.