Plurk (left), and Microsoft’s Juku. Social networking services are a dime a dozen these days, so it’s hard to keep track, but what you may not know is that Mississauga-based Plurk is a big deal in China. That market is so potentially lucrative that software behemoth Microsoft felt inclined to steamroll the Canadian microblogging startup [...]

In 2005, Maclean’s—the Canadian newsmagazine—got a redesign. In 2007, Time—the American newsmagazine—got one, too. And Maclean’s, in an editor’s note at the time, pretended to not be pissed off at their American competitor but obviously were, suggesting that Time had swiped all their good new ideas, like “more text, smaller pictures and headlines….black, white, red, [...]

As of Friday, the epic, two-year-long dispute between Trevor Brown and Crystal Castles over the band’s unauthorized use of Brown’s image of Madonna has quickly and decisively come to an end. Brown announced on his blog that the band’s new worldwide managers, James Sandom and Paul Everett of the London-based SuperVision Management Group, sent him [...]

Photo of Alice Glass of Crystal Castles by jean hambourg. Used under a Creative Commons license. Have you been following the most recent Crystal Castles controversy? Broken well over a month ago (but only shortly after the Trevor Brown incident, covered here by David Topping), the claim is that Crystal Castles knowingly broke Creative Commons [...]

Photos of CablePulse24′s broadcast on July 25, 2007, courtesy of Joel Charlebois. Just before noon on July 25, 2007, Joel Charlebois caught a man, he says, breaking into his house. When Charlebois gave chase, the man fell from the second-storey deck, landing hard on the ground below and breaking his leg. As police arrived, Charlebois—an [...]

When NOW featured Crystal Castles as their cover story two months ago, implicit in the whole article were three little words that get tossed around again and again when people talk about the band: next big thing. The details of the buzz band’s rise are astonishing and fascinating—the mic check discovered by a label in [...]

Hey! Torontoist just got ripped off by The Sun. From our article on Posterchild’s subway pamphlets, published online here on Friday, January 18: Posterchild––street artist extraordinaire and our new curator for Vandalist––has taken it on himself to fill the empty hooks of the TTC’s subways, streetcars, and buses with new and improved information flyers. For [...]

One more piece of bad news for Jane Pitfield’s campaign: besides having one of the worst glamour shots we’ve ever seen on her media page (see above), whoever’s writing her blog for her is cribbing Spacing Votes, Spacing Magazine’s election blog. Details are a bit scarce, but what we know for sure so far is [...]