Twitter fever sweeps Korea

When the social-networking site was launched a few years ago, it instantly attracted enthusiastic responses from the country's sports stars and entertainers who were often accused of capitalizing on the features to drum up support and a greater fan base.

In addition, political parties consistently resorted to Twitter during elections. Rep. Na Kyung-won of the governing Grand National Party (GNP) is to hold a press meeting on Twitter while running in the party's leadership race slated for this month.

Now the horizon is expanding. Tycoons of the country's conglomerates, respected politicians in their 60s and older novelists are also briskly contributing to the Twitter frenzy.

Doosan Corp. Chairman Park Yong-maan might be the most outstanding example as the 55-year-old keeps "tweeting" although he has received some unwanted media attention due to his remarks on the site.

The latest high-profile newcomers to Twitter are Park Geun-hye, 58, the former chairwoman of the GNP, and novelist Hwang Sok-yong, who was born in early 1943 during Japanese colonial rule.

Touted as one of the strongest candidates to become the next president, Park opened her Twitter account late last month and has drawn around 16,000 followers as of Sunday. She seems to run the site on her own instead of having her secretariat manage it.

"Hello, this is Park. I hope to share a lot of time with you … Many may wonder whether or not I manage this Twitter account directly. This is somewhat difficult for a novice like me but I am taking charge of it myself," Park said.

Hwang, most of whose books deal with such serious topics as war, the division of the two Koreas, labor activists or anti-dictatorial movements to name just a few, also began to tweet late last month.

More than half a million Koreans are believed to have Twitter accounts and they spend a lot of time on the mobile-blogging site, according to global market researchers.

Social media measurement company Semiocast revealed over the weekend that Korea ranked seventh in terms of the number of short messages, trailing such countries as the United States, Japan, Indonesia and Brazil.

The Paris-based entity conducted a 24-hour study on 2.9 million tweets in late June to find that the most traffic originated from Asia thanks to three countries ? Japan, Indonesia and Korea.