Ian On The Red Dot

I am not sure what the old incarnation of the page looked like nor when the supposed new page was launched (Google has a cached entry of the old page on 19 Feb 2008), but a friend shared on Facebook that apparently URA has a new page called Rediscover Singapore.

It seems like an underwhelming effort.

What’s up with using the WMV format? And what’s up with the inconsistency with the display of the videos. One takes me to a page where I have to download the WMV Player plugin. Another needs me to download the wmv file. The last video takes me to another page - although the video I would be looking for is the first one I see, I need to click another link to get the video.

I mean, this sounds like a really half-baked effort from a government agency. Surely some thought could have been made on taking all the videos and hosting them at the same place and displaying them with the same interface.

With the ubiquity of Flash, why isn’t the flv format and a flash player used? Better yet, why not host the video on YouTube and embed the video into the page. Better yet, you can actually skin your own version of the YouTube player.

The Walking Maps got me excited. But when I looked at it I was terribly disappointed. I really shouldn’t be surprised. What’s up with just scanning in pamphlets. I mean, look, we have Google Maps. We could, you know, do a mashup. The people over here and here seem to be doing better work.

Of course, you might add, I can’t print out a Google Map. Nonsense. You can. Go Google about it. I really don’t get the use of the pdf format here. Not when you have better formats to represent these sort of data online.

And finally, why would I even want to print out the map. Seriously. If i can find a copy of the original pamphlet, I’ll rather use that. So how does the page add value as a new channel of distribution? Might I suggest doing videos and mp3s for iPods? I can load these videos and mp3s when I am exploring a particular part of Singapore.

Oh well…. I just hope they didn’t pay whoever they did too much money for this effort.