The more I talk to the Youth Olympic Games folks to uncover stories for Digital Life, the more I find out that some of the really interesting YOG social media content is hidden behind “official” content and not given enough publicity.

Take a look at the Youth Guru YouTube video below. It’s quite a hilarious series, with 15 videos to date. *Chio peng* (aka ROTFLMAO in hokkien dialect). Well done Youth Guru folks!

The content in this series is far more fun than many of the videos on the official Singapore2010 channel on YouTube. Youth Guru should have its own YouTube channel, or just highlighted instead of being lost in the array of official videos on the main channel.

As I’ve said before, I think some of the social media content for YOG needs more love. For example, this Youth Guru series is hilarious. Others, like the Odyssey Singapore 2010 virtual world, needs a little bit more work.

The key issue is that all of them could use a little more publicity. And as I’ve said before, one relatively easy way is to reach out to the Singaporean blogs!

The inaugural Youth Olympic Games, or YOG for short, is running in Singapore this year from 14th to 26th August.

As part of the worldwide promotion to create buzz around the event, the Singapore Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee (SYOGOC), together with the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), is creating a virtual world called Singapore 2010 Odyssey.

Said RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay, Chief Executive Officer of IDA at the official launch on Saturday 6th March: “The Singapore 2010 Odyssey is a unique virtual world platform offering many possibilities for learning, social networking and entertainment, as it reaches out to the youths from all over the world in a fun and interactive way. The development of the 3D virtual world is testimony to Singapore’s infocomm capabilities in innovatively harnessing digital media technologies to support major events like the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games.”

Of course, what’s more important is the content of this virtual world. I had a preview of the world last Wednesday at a media/blogger session (the news was embargoed till today) but to see how it really was working out, I decided to give it a real life test.

I’m really glad that the Gothere.sg folks got their 90 seconds of fame when Minister of Finance Tharman Shanmugaratnam mentioned them in the recent unveiling of the Singapore budget.

Gothere has built a darn heck of a great transport site in Singapore, and the guys have both passion and great ideas. Hopefully their S$100K project with LTA will allow them to grow into something more robust.

Caught up with them recently at Garag3, the NUS incubator for “mad geniuses”. When I was there chatting with them, they showcased their streetlevel views function to me, which I thought was pretty darn cool. Similar to Google’s StreetViews (available in US, Australia, Japan and parts of Europe), Gothere is first Singapore street directory site to incorporate such a function.

If you live in Singapore and you haven’t heard of or tried Gothere, do yourself a favour and take a look. It’s such a useful resource that I have the URL bookmarked in my brain.

I’ll flat out admit it: I’m a huge fan and user.

Of all the various map, location and road routing sites for Singapore, I feel that Gothere is the best. It trashes the competition out there in terms of usability and function: the incumbent Streetdirectory, StreetDB, and Google Maps.

Don’t even get me started on SLA’s map or Rednano’s one.

Started up in just May 2008 this year, Gothere.sg has generated buzz in the blogosphere but is still under the radar in the mainstream.

The idea: you spot a pair of pink hello kitty slippers in a boutique mall in Japan’s trendy Shinjuku shopping district to die for, and you want to let all your friends know. You whip out your phone, snap it, and upload it where all your friends can goggle over your latest purchase.

Except that with Shoplette (beta), the whole world can find out what and where you like to shop.

“Shopping is a very social thing,” said Shoplette founder Shannon Low Shen-Li, 32, in an interview with Techgoondu. “If you spot a good buy, you are often excited to tell others about what you have bought!”

Yebber is a Singapore-based website that aggregates reviews by end users and provides a mechanism for users to search for them.

So far, pretty standard. The catch? It pays you to have an opinion.

How does it work? You create an account, hammer out a review, and it pays you Yebber dollars, which can be exchanged for gifts or hard cash.