Results tagged “twitter”

“Guys, we did it. He's actually here!" Toronto comedian Bob Kerr exclaimed in front of a sold-out, standing room–only crowd while he hosted the first of two shows at the Rivoli starring Paul F. Tompkins. Tompkins, if you didn't know already, is an enviably talented Los Angeles–based comic with a resume that includes decades of stand-up, TV (Mr. Show, Best Week Ever), and movies (There Will Be Blood, The Informant!), but before last month, he had never set foot in Hogtown. So, what brought him here? Twitter, Facebook, and Bob Kerr. Together, Kerr and Tompkins took advantage of all that is good in social media and started a trend that shows no signs of abating.

One of the many interesting things about Twitter is its democratizing power. Everyone with an account has an identical ability to get in touch with any other user of the service. The amount of high-profile types using Twitter makes this flat communication structure an especially liberating thing. Wil Wheaton can talk to Levar Burton, but so can we, if we want to (though Mr. La Forge/Reading Rainbow might be more inclined to tweet back to his Enterprise crewmate than to Torontoist). But there's one particular thing that Twitter doesn't do very well, and this minor weakness has resulted, somewhat bizarrely, in the tangential involvement, in Toronto municipal politics, of a conservative family man from Utah.

"I do pushups with no shirt on. And I want to be your mayor."

Insanely popular Dinosaur Comics is one of Toronto's most unusual success stories. Insanely popular Twitter is one of the internet's most unusual success stories. Mash them up and you have a whole new level of meta.

It’s a surreal experience—interviewing a guy about an online “lifecasting” experiment and unwittingly becoming a part of it. But if there’s one lesson we can take away from the hour we spent with Hal Niedzviecki and his surveillance equipment (in his home, no less), it’s this: we should probably get used to it. That is, we should—and you should—probably get used to being watched.

This week, NOW Magazine called out Jesse Brown, of TVO’s Search Engine, over comments Brown made on Monday night at SaveOurNet.ca’s Open Internet Town Hall meeting at the Gladstone Hotel. If you missed our coverage of the net neutrality event, here’s what Brown said: "NOW Magazine, Rabble.ca, the absent Mrs. Chow—is it necessarily a good idea to align net neutrality with the far left in Canadian politics? I can see it just as easily being a right-wing free market libertarian issue…why don’t we keep net neutrality neutral and put up a big tent, and everybody who cares about it can get under?"

We are all geeks now. It's seen in the massive popularity of the Star Trek reboot, in the adoption of instant messaging and Twitter (descended from the chat rooms and IRC channels we forever associate with old-school modem sounds), and in the way people soup up laptops or accessorize iPods. The gravitational pull of the social web is so strong it seems every and any company has dived in, racking up Twitter and Facebook accounts, hoping to capture a few seconds of attention span from the overstimulated millenials. The banks—often the most careful corporations in Canada about use of their image and brand—are no exception and have dived into the Wild Wild West of Web 2.0. Scotiabank, CIBC, RBC, TD, and ING Direct, for example, have all joined Twitter, the rapidly growing micro-blogging site.

There has been a huge kerfuffle across the blogosphere in the past week, and at the centre of it one can find none other than the Toronto Star's very own Antonia Zerbisias. We've called out the Zerb before (back when her blog kind of sucked, but we're glad to report it's gotten a lot better since then), but this time is special.

Today is a dark day: the fake Rosie DiManno Twitter account (@RosieDiManno) is no more. Star cohort Antonia Zerbisias figured out its lack of verisimilitude a while ago, though those who didn't would be forgiven; DiManno, after all, is pretty much always verging on unintended self-parody anyway. Still, the Star's worst writer seemingly wasn't the reason that the joke died over the weekend—her bosses were. The Star's Marissa Nelson, the senior editor of digital news, publically called out the account as fake on Friday, calling it "fake / squatter" and asking the Twitter gods to "plz remove immediately."

When is the new Dark Horse opening? For a fragment of the coffee-obsessed populace, the tease of a West Side Edition of the beloved café on Queen East became a mild obsession. The buzz began in January on Twitter, when word spread that co-owners Deanna Zunde and Ed Lynds would be expanding to a second location. (Zunde was surprised when asked back then for some more information on their plans. "We only took possession of the space a couple of days ago!" she said.) Delays caused by a stalled permit from the city turned the launch into a tantric exercise for devotees and, on Tuesday, the doors flung open at 215 Spadina Avenue.

For a week now, someone's been pretending to be Rosie DiManno on Twitter. With tweets like "i'm having a other joss stone moment. What streak should I put in my luscious mane next? coitus interruptus male member pink?"; her latest, "is looking to hire an intern to help consolidate the venom drenched hate mail her columns keep receiving"; and our favourite, "@petermansbridge next time try not to cut such a wide swath with your penis" (cf. this, and note that Mansbridge's Twitter account was also fake), it was always pretty obvious that twitter.com/RosieDiManno was not, in fact, Rosie DiManno. But last night Star co-worker and legitimately excellent writer Antonia Zerbisias stepped in to confirm the account's fakery. Still, we had no idea: DiManno and Zerbisias are actually friends? This truly is opposite world.

Mesh, as "Canada’s web conference," is naturally tricked out with tech goodies—Microsoft made an appearance with the new Surface, for example. You’ll find podcasts and video streaming and Twitter feeds for the two-day conference, so that even if you didn’t attend you’d still have a good idea of what went on. Through live-blogs and Twitter, this year’s talks and panels were boiled down into a jambalaya of Coles Notes, quips, and talking points. With as many as four sessions going on simultaneously, participants could use the tech to catch up on the ones they missed. (We got into the fun by live-tweeting mesh, which you can check out here.) Mesh, started only in 2006, often catches the zeitgeist of the web scene, as one person noted. This year it became very clear that whether you Twitter or Facebook or instant message or blog, ich bin ein Computerfreak.

This week's Twitter inspiration via Jesse Hirsh.

This week's Twitter inspiration via activeverbs.

This week's twitter inspiration via The Walrus.

In this edition: Gentleman Reg, Nick Flanagan, Daryn Jones, and Steven Page.

If you've been looking for Canada's own Alexander Wang, you can rest your eyes now. Travis Taddeo has arrived. Let's do a little point-by-point, shall we?

In this week's digest: Chris Bosh, Robert J. Kennedy, Rannie Turingan (Photojunkie), and Aurora79. Your 140–character recommendations always welcome, too.

A few weeks ago, Torontoist learned through top fashion blogger Anita Clarke that St. Marc Spa, one of Toronto's gay bathhouses, was on Twitter [language not safe for work]. It seemed odd to see a business used to being relatively hush-hush on such a public forum beyond the queer media. Rolyn Chambers, director of St. Marc Spa, says it’s a conscious effort to bring the bathhouses—or, at least, St. Marc Spa—in step with the times, or, as he puts it, "bring it out of the closet."

Erin Bury and Sarah Prevette have had a very long month. The two women were the chief organizers behind the Toronto version of Twestival benefiting charity: water, which builds wells in impoverished nations. The event, held last Thursday at CiRCA, included live video streaming of Twestival parties from around the world; a community fair that showcased organizations that were, according to Prevette, "harnessing social media for social good"; and three rooms for dancing, networking, and photograph-taking.

Today was not a good internet day for soon-to-be-former National Post technology reporter (and fleeting Torontoist contributor from way back when) David George-Cosh. In the opening shot in a brief but intense public fight on Twitter, one summarized nicely on MediaStyle, product marketer April Dunford earlier this afternoon called out an at-that-point-unnamed journalist: "Reporter to me 'When the media calls you, you jump, OK!?' Why, when you called me and I’m not selling? Newspapers will get what they deserve." George-Cosh was a touch displeased, outing himself as the "reporter," and telling Dunford "hey april - fuck you. seriously. fuck you" as she tried to calm him down.

Let's officially declare this the weekend of the O'Neals.

As far as dissimilar things go, live-blogging a power outage must be something nearly as absurd as dancing about architecture. But when a flood blew into a Dufferin Street transformer station just before 10 p.m. on Thursday night, power blew out across much of Toronto's west end. Our coverage—updated continuously over the twenty-four hours that power was down—continues after the fold.

The last few weeks have seen a slow but steady flow of new net-based services for frustrated commuters. First came TTCupdates (TTCu for short), created by former Torontoist contributor Brian Gilham, which takes service alerts from the Toronto Transit Commission's RSS feed and posts them to Twitter. The TTC itself followed suit yesterday, albeit in a slightly more old-fashioned way, with the launch of its e-alert service. Now comes TTCupdates Community Edition, which takes the basic idea behind TTCu and gives it a democratized twist.

Two months ago, Michael Ignatieff joined Twitter. Under his biography, he clearly stated his objective: Michael Ignatieff for leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Over five weeks, he updated fifteen times ("Is energized by the crowd last night – what a great way to start a week. Off to Ottawa today," he wrote on November 24) and accumulated 754 followers.

Photo by hyfen from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Jack Layton may have still had a shitty week, but his Twitter never got hacked with messages about "poop time" or Olivia being a douche—Accordion Guy picked the screenshot of Layton's Twitter up from image dump site File Pile (the name Miss Fipi Lele, his "reliable source," is just a play on the site's name, which we didn't know at the time), and he was notified last night by the person who posted the image there that it was fake. We can still dream, though.

(UPDATE: It's a fake!) It's been a pretty shitty week for Jack Layton. First, he faced an enormous backlash from supporters and opponents alike after he threatened to back out of the leaders debates if Elizabeth May was allowed to participate in them, and, yesterday afternoon, his Twitter got into the hands of someone who made three quick entries: "Olivia's being a douche."; "Alright, poop time."; and "Okay, poop is coming out." The entries remained on his Twitter for at least fourteen hours, more than enough time to make the whole thing totally embarrassing.

ART: Art enthusiast groups City of Craft and the workroom have organized a kid-friendly crafts fair, happening today in Parkdale. Both the workroom (1340 Queen Street West) and the Good Catch General Store (1556 Queen Street West) are having craft sales, each with fifteen local vendors selling their wares. DIY store Shopgirls Gallery Boutique (1342 Queen Street West) will be having a workshop on making sock monkeys, and you can either donate your sock monkey at the end of the workshop or pay $15 to take it with you (all donations and proceeds go towards Clowns Without Borders). Finally, head over to Yoga Queen to wind down with yoga-themed crafts and yoga games. Various locations in Parkdale, 12 p.m., FREE.