Naver

I have just taken a photo of my driver license and sent it to Naver.com to open an account. Naver is much like Yahoo! It is a search engine, email host, and also has a variety of other functions such as games, blogs, cafes (which are like clubs). The interesting thing about many of these Korean sites is that they provide hosting service for blogs at no charge! They have different regulations, but I found Naver to be best; they give you an unlimited space for storage. However, they do ask (for security and other purposes, I suppose) that uploads be limited to 5 MB/day and 1 MB per post. It's a fabulous deal, considering Blogger, Typepad, Diaryland and so on, makes you pay for storage.

The reason why I wanted to start yet another blog, is that I wanted to target a different audience. I am a Korean person, living in California. I speak (fairly) good English, and I think I can make a rather helpful blog, since even more Koreans are learning English these days. The economy has somewhat recovered from the IMF situation, and more people are heading overseas for studies. Although I can't give my expertise on living abroad in, say, London, but I think I can give a pretty good set of information for people wanting to learn English, and wanting to spend some time in the US.

Since I don't have the national number (much like a social securities number in Korea) in Korea, I had to sign up as a foreign national. Many sites don't have options for foreign nationals, or Koreans living abroad to sign up for services, but Naver does. Naver required me to send a copy of a foreign identification -- passport, ID, driver's license, etc. to sign up. And that is what I did. I'll have to figure out how I want to set up the blog -- I don't want it to be a disorganized chaos, a hodge-podge of random information. I want to start on this one before May. I have also signed up for another blog, a US blog, which will feature my writing, separate from my blog. I'm hoping to produce some fiction, but due to an overload of work and school, I won't start on it until June. I already have too much on my plate! (Which reminds me, I didn't go work out yesterday like I was supposed to... hopefully I can get around to it this evening!)