I haven’t written any articles for OutsideInKorea in a good long while. Rather than offer the usual excuses, let me point you to my new project, one that has taken up much of my time in recent months, and something I’m pretty excited about: jobsee.kr.

What’s it all about?

The Korean English-language ‘blogosphere’ (I know, don’t hit me) has exploded in recent years, and there are people out there writing their hearts out, which is wonderful, and as it should be. I’ve been in Korea and writing online about it since the late 1990′s, and at my own domains (including this one) for almost 10 years, and because of the nature of the beast, most of the weblogs have come and gone over that long stretch of days. There are a few sites that have been around for the long haul and are still thriving — Robert Koehler’s site being the canonical example — and of course on the non-weblog end of things there is Dave Sperling’s venerable Eslcafe.com, which I’m pretty sure was there, and looking much the same, when I first came to Korea back in 1996.

There are a number of job-board sites catering to the foreigner-in-Korea market that have sprung up over the years, as well. Some have gained traction, some have not, but none have shifted Dave’s site from its position at the top of the job-listing heap. One thing that seems to be almost universally true is that the job listing sites tend to be useability nightmares, or sport design aesthetics from the 1990′s, or both. Nothing much has changed, for a long long time. The emphasis has shifted firmly to recruiting companies that use their own sites to promote their job openings, but cross-post to the more popular job listing sites.

There are a plethora of bog-standard PHPBB bulletin boards out there, as well, there are groups on the social networking platforms like Facebook, and there is a floating community of sorts in the comment threads on many of the larger K-blogs. To be honest, I don’t really know what’s happening out there on the weblogs these days, because every time I’ve dipped a toe into the blogstream in the last few years, it’s come back blistered and discoloured from the level of vitriol and shoutiness and resentment percolating there.

So I had a think. I’m no designer, but I knows what I likes, and I like building sites (my network of personal sites, community sites and sites built for other people is unfeasibly large and still growing), and having spent years a) in Korea, b) in software and web design and c) in the ESL industry, I figured, hell, maybe I could do something that would fill what seemed to be to be a gaping niche.

That niche would be: a site for job-seekers, for those interested in coming to Korea, a site includes a more modern take on web-based community than the same old bulletin-board model, a site that is interactive, pleasant to look at and use, and that includes useful information and tools for the Korean expat community. And that’s kind of fun, into the bargain.

Here’s what I came up with.

I’m getting close to launch now, still second-guessing my design decisions, hammering bugs out of the woodwork, thinking about how to try and ramp it up into a vibrant and active community, and trying to plan administrative ways to make it something that’s not just another wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Little joke there, but you know what I mean. There are a lot of expats in Korea these days who are not into the whole negativity vibe that seems to grip the community, lots of long-termers and short-termers alike, and a whole generation of younger types who expect their online tools to be a little less, well, like using digital stone knives and bearskins.

So, for launch, which is coming relatively soon unless I decide on yet another tear-down-and-redesign, the site will include:

Jobs listings

Jobs listings are the core of the utility of the site, I think, and for at least a month or two after launch, I plan to make them absolutely free to employers. Little touches like Google maps showing you where the job is located, granular built-in search tools, filters and views to help jobseekers find exactly what they’re looking for, and a back-end Dashboard for employers to manage the job listings they’ve posted in the past are all part of the mix. I think it’s pretty sweet.

Resume posting

Jobseekers can post their resumes for employers to browse, tag them and categorize them so they’re easily found, and sit back and (hopefully) let the job offers roll in. Posting your resume to the site will always be free.

Live FAQ

I get a lot of questions about working and living in Korea on the various community sites I frequent (Metafilter, in particular) and via email. People want to know how things work: they need useful info before deciding to leave home, and after they arrive in Korea. That need was one of the reasons I started OutsideinKorea, but I eventually decided that the blog format wasn’t really the best way to help people out. The Jobseekr FAQ subsite is, I think. FAQs are organized by topic, and every topic has a textbox at the bottom where visitors can ask questions they might have, and I and my crack team of SuperExpats will do their best to answer. As soon as we have an answer, it’ll appear on the site, along with the question.

Community

Community is another centerpiece of the site. It’s a new take on web community, focused on individuals and ways for them to get together into groups around interests or locations, plan events out in the real world, and stay as private or as public as they wish to be. Forums are, of course, baked-in, and tied to groups, public, private or hidden from community view. It’s really a great piece of software, and I hope that people will enjoy using it. Think of it as a kind of Facebook for our community — you can even use your Facebook login to create an account there with Facebook Connect!

Another major part of the whole is that anyone who registers an account in the community — as well as being able to dive right in and start interacting with people and joining or creating groups and starting or participating in forum threads — can create, in a few clicks, their very own hosted WordPress weblog, at http://jobsee.kr/community/whatevertheywant

Weblogs are a dime a dozen these days, of course, but with tight integration to the community, and the ability to create group weblogs tied to the Groups that users can create within the community — well, if it takes off, I’m excited to see what people do with the tools I’m providing.

Thus endeth the promotional post. I hope anyone who happens by OutsideinKorea or is still subscribed to the RSS feed will go and check out the new site. Like I said, it’s going to be launching soon in all its glory, but the community subsite is ready to rock, and I’d love to see people join up and start kicking the tires.

Welcome to the next generation. I hope it kicks some butt.

There’s a new LG Telecom ad that’s been playing on Korean television recently. As happens all too frequently, I’m having a little trouble telling if it’s hilariously clever or dumb as dirt.

Here, you watch it, and decide what you think.

See, here’s the thing. Or the things. I’ve mostly gotten over the kind of pop-eyed apoplectic rage I used to feel when advertisers used rocknroll songs I loved as the soundtracks for their shills. It doesn’t bother me any more — I’ve made great strides in anger management over the years. So if LG wants to use The Clash’s Revolution Rock to sell mobile telephone services, well, I can live with that, even if I don’t like it much.

But I’m wondering if they had anyone who could speak English vet these lyrics:

Revolution rock, it is a brand new rock
A bad, bad rock, this here revolution rock
Careful how you move, Mac
you dig me in me back
And I’m so pilled up that I rattle
I have got the sharpest knife
so I get the biggest slice
I got no time to do battle

It seems a bit rogueish for an arm of one of the biggest chaebol in the country, one that owns so much of it, to be admitting “I have got the sharpest knife, so I get the biggest slice”. And being “so pilled up that I rattle” might be one heck of a fun way to spend a lost weekend, but it’s a bit much in Korea, where the last I heard one could still get the death penalty for it. But the imagery and lyrics, coupled with the tagline, are the bits that have me trying to figure out if this is clever or clueless.

Everybody knows about the Korean predilection for public demonstrations. Often violent ones. It’s probably one of the enduring images that the outside world has of Korea, much as the government would like for it to fade away — headbands, fists in the air, chanting hordes, riot cops younger than the demonstrators cowering behind plexiglass shields, blood, fire. So an ad showing people spontaneously joining some kind of mob, admittedly happy and brandishing cell phones rather than molotov cocktails, well, that’s just cheeky. And flashing the tagline “Join the Movement” at the end? Is it a clever reference to and inversion of that enduring image in the minds of foreigners?

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Crass, sure. But being semi-convinced that the Makers of Marketing Decisions at LG didn’t understand much of the lyrics of that song other than the word ‘revolution’ just doesn’t jibe with the bit that impressed me the most — the tagline “Join the Movement” pops up right after Joe Strummer sings “I got no time to do battle”.

It’s either brilliant or just plain lucky. I have no idea which.

In Korea, there’s F-Mart and D-Mart, L-Mart and G-Mart, and the current top dog of the X-Mart retailers, E-Mart. They are all much of a muchness, and are a microcosmic case study, I suppose, of the Korean predilection (and skill, it must be said) in taking someone else’s idea (in this case, a household goods retailer, K-mart (of course)), reshaping it for the Korean market, and barfing it out again, adding only the most cursory Groucho-glasses-and-nose disguise.

Recently my wife and I went to the nearby E-Mart to do some shopping, get out of the house, engage in the soothing Retail Ritual. The Retail Ritual calms me, these days, if it’s in one of these huge ultramodern, brightly lit stores. Odd, for an old hippiepunk like me, who has little good to say about our marketing-driven civilization, and often.

That said, I don’t care shopping for anything other than food, so I guess I can still fly my freak flag proudly. And although stores like Walmart and Costco are a scourge on the landscape back in North America, sucking the life out of small-town centers, feeding low-wage, no-security, permanent part-time slavery, homogenizing the already desperately whitebread-and-mayonnaise landscape even further …that’s not so much the case here. The box stores sit in the middle of already existing major shopping areas, beside subway stops, and have the opposite effect, if anything, revitalizing cruddy areas and triggering some urban renewal. These stores also tend to employ women under better conditions and for better wages than they might otherwise receive in this sexist nightmare of a nation. But more on that later.

So the wife and I were trundling around with our cart, happily sampling and grazing and knocking small children down (well, I was the one knocking them down, and the wife was the one scolding me – she pretends to tolerate my aversion to the little buggers, but I don’t think she really does), when one of those spine-chillingly weird Korea moments happened, that nobody much seems to notice or comment on, a situation which sometimes leads me to theorize that I’m living an extended hallucination in a Matrixy goo-filled pod somewhere, fed digital imagery to pacify me by some higher machine intelligence which is extracting my life energy to run pachinko machines in Osaka or something.

Some facts first that will help explain, I hope, my flash of The Weird.

In Korea, like Japan, walking into a shop or restaurant will usually result in a hail of welcomes and other ritualized greetings from the employees. I hate these, but I must admit they make me feel all shiny and special too. I am a good consumer, and I really am welcome here, and I should buy something to celebrate that, I say to myself, before I realize their cunning ploy and adopt the anti-salesperson scowl that is my customary demeanor while in-store.

In Korea, it’s (and excuse the romanization, but I’m going for clarity of pronunciation more than the current textbook romanization) ‘uh-suh-ohseyo,’ which more or less translates to ‘welcome, and please buy lots of our overpriced crap!’ On departure, particularly if you have in fact purchased some crap, it’s (phonetically, more or less) ‘kahmsahmnida‘ or ‘kohmuhpsoomnida‘, both of which mean ‘thank you, and spend again’. Well, OK, just ‘thank you’.

The other necessary fact to know is that upmarket department store chains like Hyundai or Lotte and also these more middle-class retails outlets like E-Mart and Walmart and Carrefour (foreign business, which are floundering and leaving Korea, more on which, later) all employ way, way too many people. Behind a typical watch-counter at Lotte, for example, you might see 6 to 8 men (always men, behind the watch counter, for some reason) loitering about, trying desperately to look busy, beseeching you with their eyes to please come and look at a watch or two, just for a freaking minute you rich bastard, come on …and then swarming up like Keystone-Kops-as-filmed-by-David-Lynch when someone does.

It’s good, in some ways, that so many are employed when they might otherwise not be, but you can be sure that the only way such a situation can be justified is by paying extremely low wages. The idea behind these clusters of clerks is that such heavy concentrations of service-people enhance the feeling — that wealthier Koreans, including the growing middle class, seem to just love — of being catered to by hordes of low-born types or a reasonable facsimile, grovelling before the shopper’s imperial whims. See also : Dynasty, Chosun.

Walking around the aisles of the supermarket sections of these stores is a hazard course of (usually) miniskirt-clad (invariably) young female product demonstrators, who want to give you a sample of coffee, or help you choose that perfect shampoo, and (usually) older (invariably) females in the fresh-food areas, cooking up some pork or slicing up some veggies, and inviting you to chow down, using the (invariably) plastic green toothpicks.

(What’s the female equivalent of ‘avuncular’? Damned if I know, but that’s what these fresh-food ladies are. Ajummacular, perhaps.)

The younger ones, the ones that staff the toiletries and dry-good aisles, are always goooood-lookin’, though, and pretty obviously hired on that basis, and apparently instructed to bend over, but demurely, whenever possible. Which makes astonishingly little sense, even ignoring the sex-discriminatory aspects, as the vast majority of shoppers are middle-aged women, who are unlikely to be seduced by the milky thighs of these miniskirted productistas.

Anyway. Any given row in the supermarket sections of these chains will house anywhere from a minimum to two to a maximum of six women, some of whom are apparently hired just to stand there and smile at people.

So back to the trundling and the shopping and the running-over of children. As we were rolling down the ramyeon aisle, the sixth or seventh repetition of the ecstatically faux-happy, 50′s-style E-Mart Song was coming to an orgasmic close, and there was a slight crackle over the PA, and a voice.

A female voice, one that was absolutely perfect in its unctuous, saccharine, mind-colonizing tone, oozing into your ears, grabbing whatever handholds it could find and whispering, irresistably : everything’s going to be all right, there there, just lay your weary head on my soft, perfumed, padded bosom….

Anyway, this voice sweetly but firmly intoned ‘uh-suh-ohseyo’ (‘welcome’). And every single woman employee in the place turned from whatever they were doing, as one, faced in the same direction, towards whatever Mecca-equivalent was operative, and repeated ‘uh-suh-ohseyo’ while bowing deeply, to nobody in particular. The voice paused a few seconds, then said ‘kohmuhpsoomnida‘, and once again, every single woman, matching the weirdly unnatural, woman-as-service-automaton voice, chanted ‘kohmuhpsoomnida.

This repeated perhaps four or five times, and you could hear the chorus of voices throughout the store. Nobody else even batted an eyelid, but I was just transfixed, with chills literally running up my spine. The Weird.

I know what the rationale behind it was, and understand that many Koreans really think that sort of stuff is spiffy, and are drawn to shop somewhere that shows that kind of rigorous employee-indoctrination methodology, but it was still deeply, excitingly Weird.

Of course, I forgot about it 5 minutes later, while buying beer, which was, after all, my secret mission for the day.