Flickr has just launched Places, a new location-centric way to explore the best photography in the world. Harnessing the site's geo-tagging features (which allow users to plot their photos on a map), Places creates a page for most major cities, regions, and countries, featuring popular photos, popular photographers, popular tags, and popular groups for that area. In addition to checking out the fun that is Toronto's page (top recent tags: "santaclausparade" and "parade," current......

Ontario Conservative leader John "The Tory" Tory has promised that if elected a Conservative government would allocate $800 million to public transit in the province. Tory also confessed that it has been a long-time dream of his to one day ride on a streetcar, but that his chauffeur wasn't yet licensed to drive one. David Crombie has been named "community liaison official' in the sometimes violent land claim dispute between the First Nations and......

MuchMusic reports that VJ Sarah Taylor underwent emergency surgery on Thursday morning at a hospital in Las Vegas to relieve pressure on her brain. 25-year-old Taylor remains in an induced coma in the intensive care unit and is reported in stable condition. It is not yet known what caused the pressure on her brain. The VJ was shooting on assignment at the NBA All-Star weekend when she was rushed to hospital on Wednesday. She had......

Yesterday marked the official release of Google Earth 4 (the public beta has been available since the summer), a free product with a cleaner interface and a beefed-up focus on 3-D architectural imagery. Part of the appeal Google Earth holds is "flying" through three-dimensional terrain as if in a 90s-era flight simulator, and Google wants to map bridges, skyscrapers, and landmarks as well. Television news networks have relied on the paid, enhanced version Google......

Well, not even a week until the Film Festival is left, and frankly, Torontoist is ever so slightly… No, scratch that, we’re utterly crapping our pants over the enormity of trying to cover the world’s largest film festival. We’re only little! Both Eye and Now have already started their festival buzz machines, um, buzzing – Now have taken the choice of starting their capsule review stuffed film fest preview a week in advance (we guess......

If it weren't for our life as an -ist, we're not sure we'd ever leave our apartment. Fortunately, to fully -ist, one must seek out the new, the fresh, and the unknown. Brand new, or just new to us, that's what we're all about this week. Phillyist keeps it fresh by getting a new motto, learning to prioritize, and taking in an experimental indie rock show. Torontoist does their first post in franglais, gets ready......

It's old news now, but just in case you didn't hear, Boing Boing editor and former Torontonian Cory Doctorow is one of three judges for the 2006 Blooker prize. The Lulu Blooker prize is awarded to the best non-fiction, fiction and comic books inspired by a blog (or blog turned into books). The most impressive title on the short list, in Torontoist's humble opinion is Julie Powell's Julie and Julia, the New York secretary that......

Excuse the lateness of this post - the Live 8 announcement was this morning - but we've been working on calming ourselves down all day. The jaw-dropping news of a lame-centric Live 8 concert left us in a state of speechless, head shaking shock. After throwing a few chairs and kicking a few garbage cans, we decided that Live 8 might be the worst concert ever held on Canadian soil. Here's our exasperated reaction: a)......

It's easy to avoid The Game and Fifty Cents. Likewise for Nickelback. It's even pretty easy to stay away from Thornley and the Barenaked Ladies. They don't bother us, and we don't bother them. But there are some bands, SOME bands, that bring us to the brink of violent disgust; it's almost beyond hatred. One example that is often played out here on Mercredi Mixtape is our distaste for Las Vegas corporate rockers The Killers.......