Doing some research on Korean virtual communities, I ran across this picture of South Korean Cyworld (taken on Wikipedia):

Cyworld (Korean: 싸이월드) is a South Korean web community site operated by SK Communications, a subsidiary of SK Telecom. Literally translated, "Cyworld" means "relationship world."

Members cultivate on- and off-line relationships by forming "first-degree" (Korean: 일촌) buddy relationships with each other through a service called "minihompy," which encompasses a photo gallery, message board, guestbook, and personal bulletin board. A user can link his/her minihompy to another user's minihompy to form a buddy relationship. It has been reported that as much as 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s are registered users of Cyworld, and as of September 2005, daily unique visitors are about 20 million.

Why do I blog this? Web platforms/virtual communities control displays might be amazingly relevant with regard to the kind of information designers could access to. Following in real-time what happen on Google, Web2.0 applications or multi-user games might be impressive.

Judging from the picture, there seems to be lots of quantitative data (various vizualisations) and some qualitative data (harder to summarize them visually). This raises lots of questions like what do they extract? how do they use them? + What's about privacy concerns!