B
badga416
Guest
Interesting article on websites about the city including mention of this forum. I wonder who the author is referring to as the "guy who keeps writing in, proposing that they run express bus routes to his house"????
Love your city, and love it on-line
By IVOR TOSSELL
Friday, February 3, 2006 Posted at 10:13 AM EST
From Friday's Globe and Mail
You might have noticed that business about the motorist who got into a violent scuffle with a cyclist in a trendy Toronto neighbourhood last week. Apparently, it began as a food-fight when the motorist littered and the cyclist threw his food back at him; it ended with the motorist blowing his lid and lunging at her, a manic snarl on his face.
This being 2006, a passing blogger caught the sequence on camera and posted it to a Web forum, where tens of thousands came to gawk at the spectacle of cyclist and motorist, two natural enemies, having at it. As one blogger later wrote, it was as if the photographer "captured a fight between a killer whale and a great white shark."
Sure enough, after a few days of breathless on-line chatter, it erupted into the mainstream media. But before a mess like this can froth into the offline world, it needs a kettle to boil in; if there's a lesson here, it's that the Web's community of city-watchers has grown big enough to brew its own media event.
At first, city-lovers -- they call themselves urbanists -- seem to be another one of the Web's overrepresented constituencies, along with train spotters and Monty Python fans. But it's not so arbitrary as it might seem.
Urbanists get excited about the joys of human contact that cities bring; Internet trendsetters, meanwhile, are busy forging new social networks on-line. Both harbour hopeful thoughts about using community to improve the planet; both prefer public to private. Considering that both pursuits draw heavily from the same urban, educated and youngish demographic, it figures that a lot of on-line personalities might have urbanist sympathies.
And it's the youth demographic that seems to dominate; two franchises of city-centric blogs have been popping up on local browsers lately. One is a made-in-Canada project called Freshdaily Cities; its flagships include the Vancouver-based Beyond Robson (http://www.beyondrobson.ca) and the well-established BlogTO (blogto.com) across the country. Similarly, Torontoist (torontoist.com) has a virtually identical concept, the only Canadian outpost of a global city-blog franchise that started with New York's popular Gothamist.
Both franchises pursue the urban twentysomething with a flip, sometimes indulgent style of reporting the detritus of city life. Their format sees a stable of young writers gather events about town, pictures of funny signs, political beefs, conversations overheard on the street -- into a digest that's earthy and vapid by turns. You could either call it water-cooler journalism, or the stuff of urban life, and you'd be right either way.
Vancouver is also home to a couple of successful group blogs, which offer a more relaxed approach to city writing. Metroblogging Vancouver (vancouver.metblogs.com) pools the local observations of 12 writers; Urban Vancouver (http://www.urbanvancouver.com), meanwhile, takes content from a number of local blogs and blends it with news and events listings to make a community portal.
But it's in sooty old Toronto, of all places, that urban interest has blossomed into outright adoration. You can see it in the Spacing blog (spacing.ca/wire), run by the folks who produce a local magazine of the same name; it embodies that city's newfound sense that being hated by the rest of the country doesn't mean it has to hate itself.
You'll also see it in the work of urban photobloggers, who post photographic diaries instead of written ones. Photobloggers are everywhere, but sites like Daily Dose of Imagery (http://www.topleftpixel.com), which focuses on the cityscape, are thinly veiled valentines.
But the most interesting site for the urban-curious might well be the Urban Toronto forum (http://www.urbantoronto.ca), a bulletin board that strikes me as a conspicuously functional corner of the Internet. It's a hotbed of news, speculation, argument and anonymous carping about the city: its towers, its parks, its busses, its politicians. It attracts everyone from industry insiders to bookish planning students to the guy who keeps writing in, proposing that they run express bus routes to his house.
Best of all, its denizens haven't got caught up in Toronto's latter-day spirit of self-congratulation; here is the insecure city its residents know and love. Up this week: pictures of Vancouver, and how Toronto wishes it looked that good.
Love your city, and love it on-line
By IVOR TOSSELL
Friday, February 3, 2006 Posted at 10:13 AM EST
From Friday's Globe and Mail
You might have noticed that business about the motorist who got into a violent scuffle with a cyclist in a trendy Toronto neighbourhood last week. Apparently, it began as a food-fight when the motorist littered and the cyclist threw his food back at him; it ended with the motorist blowing his lid and lunging at her, a manic snarl on his face.
This being 2006, a passing blogger caught the sequence on camera and posted it to a Web forum, where tens of thousands came to gawk at the spectacle of cyclist and motorist, two natural enemies, having at it. As one blogger later wrote, it was as if the photographer "captured a fight between a killer whale and a great white shark."
Sure enough, after a few days of breathless on-line chatter, it erupted into the mainstream media. But before a mess like this can froth into the offline world, it needs a kettle to boil in; if there's a lesson here, it's that the Web's community of city-watchers has grown big enough to brew its own media event.
At first, city-lovers -- they call themselves urbanists -- seem to be another one of the Web's overrepresented constituencies, along with train spotters and Monty Python fans. But it's not so arbitrary as it might seem.
Urbanists get excited about the joys of human contact that cities bring; Internet trendsetters, meanwhile, are busy forging new social networks on-line. Both harbour hopeful thoughts about using community to improve the planet; both prefer public to private. Considering that both pursuits draw heavily from the same urban, educated and youngish demographic, it figures that a lot of on-line personalities might have urbanist sympathies.
And it's the youth demographic that seems to dominate; two franchises of city-centric blogs have been popping up on local browsers lately. One is a made-in-Canada project called Freshdaily Cities; its flagships include the Vancouver-based Beyond Robson (http://www.beyondrobson.ca) and the well-established BlogTO (blogto.com) across the country. Similarly, Torontoist (torontoist.com) has a virtually identical concept, the only Canadian outpost of a global city-blog franchise that started with New York's popular Gothamist.
Both franchises pursue the urban twentysomething with a flip, sometimes indulgent style of reporting the detritus of city life. Their format sees a stable of young writers gather events about town, pictures of funny signs, political beefs, conversations overheard on the street -- into a digest that's earthy and vapid by turns. You could either call it water-cooler journalism, or the stuff of urban life, and you'd be right either way.
Vancouver is also home to a couple of successful group blogs, which offer a more relaxed approach to city writing. Metroblogging Vancouver (vancouver.metblogs.com) pools the local observations of 12 writers; Urban Vancouver (http://www.urbanvancouver.com), meanwhile, takes content from a number of local blogs and blends it with news and events listings to make a community portal.
But it's in sooty old Toronto, of all places, that urban interest has blossomed into outright adoration. You can see it in the Spacing blog (spacing.ca/wire), run by the folks who produce a local magazine of the same name; it embodies that city's newfound sense that being hated by the rest of the country doesn't mean it has to hate itself.
You'll also see it in the work of urban photobloggers, who post photographic diaries instead of written ones. Photobloggers are everywhere, but sites like Daily Dose of Imagery (http://www.topleftpixel.com), which focuses on the cityscape, are thinly veiled valentines.
But the most interesting site for the urban-curious might well be the Urban Toronto forum (http://www.urbantoronto.ca), a bulletin board that strikes me as a conspicuously functional corner of the Internet. It's a hotbed of news, speculation, argument and anonymous carping about the city: its towers, its parks, its busses, its politicians. It attracts everyone from industry insiders to bookish planning students to the guy who keeps writing in, proposing that they run express bus routes to his house.
Best of all, its denizens haven't got caught up in Toronto's latter-day spirit of self-congratulation; here is the insecure city its residents know and love. Up this week: pictures of Vancouver, and how Toronto wishes it looked that good.
