背包走天涯之纽约

Staying Connected

When Aunt Jenny came here almost 20 years ago it wasn’t easy, for the only source of information she had was the embassy itself. Calls to US were also costly. She somewhat survived through all of that. In comparison technology advancements allowed me to gather information via ways which would have been unthinkable in Aunt Jenny’s days. I booked my flight ticket online, mapped my route from the JFK to the Grand Central and then to my house and workplace through various websites and even had a bird’s eye view of the locations via satellite images. I knew beforehand that the bus would only be one block away, and that there would be eateries and barber around the corner. I could also see the pictures of the house and the room that I would be living in. The bottom-line: there were absolutely no question marks in my passage here. Auto-roaming makes me reachable at all times and I can call my family and friends at anytime and talk to them for as long as I want because VOIP is so inexpensive.

With all these technology in place one would have thought that it would be easy to stay in touch with Singapore. I realized that it is not. First and foremost, when I tried to listen to Mediacorp’s radio channels via the web browser, it detected that I have a foreign IP (for the non-tech pple, an IP is like an address) and it wouldn’t allow me to stream the radio. Disappointed, I registered with Mobtv. I was willing to pay a subscription fee to download the local drama series, yet again it slammed the door on me with a “We are sorry to inform you that we do not provide the service to foreign IP at this point in time. Thank you for your interest.”

I was desperate to get anything on Singapore and I could by reading the news from the web, but The Straits Times required a subscription fee to read the news and their feeds as well. (A news feed is brief textual news which you can subscribe to very much like you do for a magazine). The Straits Times implemented that a few years ago after realizing that people used its online news as a free substitute for the physical paper. I disapprove of such practice because online news should be provided to anyone, even if they are brief ones like feeds. By keeping all its internet news strictly to a subscription based model, The Straits Times is effectively shutting out traffic of netizens, and I have no doubt that this impacts its revenue from online advertisements too. It is, therefore, not surprising that ChannelNewsAsia and Zaobao are able to garner awards for being the websites with the most hits. Perhaps it is time that The Straits Times revises its business model and offers bits and pieces of news for free again. Every newspaper has a social responsibility to keep its citizens well-informed. A subscription fee only serves to divert netizens to other news sites and it doesn’t help that netizens are used to having free things (think Gmail, Blogger, Yahoo Photos, Wikipedia and YouTube). Having said that, poor Singaporeans do not have that many newspapers to turn to (I wouldn’t consider The New Paper to be one).

In April, the Singapore Government is collaborating with NYSA to host a Singapore Day in Bryant Park in NYC. The Singaporeans in New York can catch up with their homeland while enjoying Singapore’s entertainment and food. In order to reach out to everyone here the website awards an air ticket to New York for those who provide contacts of Singaporeans here. I provided my own contact on their website and I wonder whether that makes me eligible for that air ticket? Allow me to daydream a little bit. Anyhow the country recognizes the problem of Singaporeans forgetting their roots after working for a few years abroad and they have also set up a website for overseas Singaporeans. Thumbs up for their efforts but I think more can be done. If you want Singaporeans to desire to come back an annual one day event wouldn’t do. More needs to be done to evoke their feelings and it is easier to do that today with technology. The web portal for Singaporeans is more of a pull strategy so those who bother to browse the website are those who bother to come back so it is, in fact, still not reaching out to the “quitters”. In my opinion these are what OSU can do:

• Obtain the emails of all Singaporeans who would be going away for 6 months or more, this on a voluntarily basis of course.
• Sign them up automatically for newsletters from the respective overseas Singapore Association.
• Email each of them a “Goodie Bag” which contains a free subscription to Mobtv, Straits Times Interactive and a Singapore Widget sitting pretty on their desktop pushing news and radio content to them.
• Have a web service that streams news in video
• Remove all foreign IP restrictions. Rave up the server bandwidth and make them sign in with their Sing pass if necessary.

It is time to truly stay connected.

(uploaded album "Niagara Falls")

posted by wayne @ 4:41 PM