Results tagged “socialmedia”

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.

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.

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.

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."

No one expected nine hundred people to show up to PodCamp. Sure, that many people signed up on the PodCamp wiki, but, last year, only three hundred people had attended the weekend-long "unconference in all things podcasting, blogging, and new media." Connie Crosby, one of the organizers, figured since PodCamp was free, there'd be a good chunk of no-shows. She projected attendance at four hundred.

Mathew Ingram, a technology writer for the Globe and Mail and has been on the tech beat for the last 17 years. Now he's sharing some of his knowledge as an organizer of MeshU, a web conference happening on May 20 where the brightest and shiniest tech brains will converge. Speakers include Daniel Burka, the designer behind Digg, and Leah Culver, a co-founder of Pownce. We spoke to Ingram about MeshU, how companies mess up in Web 2.0, and the future of the web.