The WOT team has a new member from far away. Kaye, our new intern from Korea, started at the WOT office a few weeks ago, and will be with us until June. Currently WOT has some 20,000 users in Korea. In a country with a population of nearly 50 million, there would definitely be room for the WOT community to grow. Let's learn a bit more about Kaye and hear her views on the Korean market potential for WOT.

Kaye, what brought you to Finland?

I study business administration in Daegu, the fourth biggest city of Korea. I’m taking part in an exchange program between my school in Korea and a school in Helsinki. Therefore I’m spending six months studying in Finland. As a part of my studies, I need to work two days a week in a Finnish company.

Why Finland?

In Korea, Finland is known for its high level of education. I wanted to experience that in practice. Finland is a very different country than my own, but I like it. It’s very exotic and interesting. Living in a faraway country is a very enlightening experience. You meet a lot of new people and learn from their ideas and cultures, and really have to challenge yourself. I believe that I can benefit from this experience later both in my studies and in the working life.

How did you end up doing your internship at WOT?

I like challenges and want to work for something meaningful. That's why I was very pleased when my exchange coordinator arranged me the internship at WOT. I left abroad to learn from other cultures and working at WOT that has a global user community and multicultural team supports that. I get to practice English here and have also learned some Finnish.

Do you use the WOT add-on?

Well, before my internship I didn’t, but I downloaded it the moment I started here. Since the beginning I’ve liked the design of the donuts. When using WOT, I also learned that it really doesn’t slow down browsing and thus is very convenient to use. Most of the pages that I use do have reputations, also the most popular Korean sites. However, we need to build the community in Korea to get more sites rated there. I do rate websites myself, especially those Korean websites I use a lot and know that are trustworthy, but don’t yet have reputations in the WOT system.

What have you been doing at WOT?

Currently I have been thinking up ideas on how to increase the coverage of WOT in Korea. The first thing would be to have the add-on in Korean. Korea has a huge population of web users, in fact the largest in Asia when measured as a percentage of the total population (77 %). In Korea, peer-to-peer reviews are of great value and other people’s recommendations have a big impact on people’s decisions, so therefore there’s a lot of potential for the WOT community to grow. Korean web users don't use Google that much when searching but prefer a Korean search engine called Naver. Therefore it would be important to have the WOT reputation icons shown on Naver search results too.

Do you have any greetings to our community?

Yes: The job you're doing is very important. I'm glad to boost the trust on the web with you!

Safe surfing,
Kaye