[PHOTO] Garbage Bin at Bloor and Spadina

Garbage Bin at Bloor and Spadina
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Thanks to dark_age_gal for suggesting this subject for photography. Isn't the strike so photogenic?

[LINK] Some Friday links

• blogTo's Rick McGinnis describes the near-complete state of ruin that Kodak's Toronto facilities have fallen into.


• The Bloor-Lansdowne blog announces that the Gladstone Library will reopen on the 23rd of this month.
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• Broadsides' Antonia Zerbisias covers the Conservatives' opposition to funding Toronto's gay pride.


• Over at Demography Matters, co-blogger Aslak is pessimistic about Greenland's future as an independent state, not least because of low skill levels and a lack of anything that could serve as an economic base for a new country.


• Daniel Drezner considers the question of whether or not blogging has become professionalized, with static blogging networks. His conclusion? There are always exceptions.
  
• Far Outliers notes the nasty elements of Sri Lanka's defeat of the Tamil Tigers and explores Japan's puppet states in Second World War-era China.
  
• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros covers Uganda, a country that could well become relevant to Europe in some time.


• Joe. My. God lets us know that Poland's Lech Walesa is horrified that Madonna is visiting Poland.


• pauldrye at Passing Strangeness explores the first major terrorist attack on 20th century New York City, the 1920 bombing of Wall Street.


• Spacing Toronto's Jake Schabas takes on the problems with Richard Florida's writing on the creative classes' role in the success of cities, like the question of whether correlation or causation is at work.


• The Undercover Economist's Tim Harford writes about the intimate relationship between complexity and economic success.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that non-Russian immigrants in Moscow aren't assimilating to the extent that they once did and are retaining their ethnic identities.

[LINK] More Hargittai on Social Networkin

I'd like to thank Eszter Hargittai for making an appearance in the comments for my [LINK] yesterday to her post on social networking. It seems that the differences between Facebook and MySpace users might be even greater.

As I mention in the post on Crooked Timber (as an update in the comments), the particulars of the sample (that both age and educational level of the respondents is close to constant) likely means that the findings are more conservative than if you had a more diverse sample. That is, if we're going to see socioeconomic status differences (measured here by parental education) even among this group then we're likely to see even larger such differences if we had people from more diverse backgrounds.

[CAT] Cat stationed on Bloor

Cat stationed on Bloor
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

For years, I've seen this cat sitting with a relaxed air in front of an apartment door, where a taped sign lets passersby know that this is, in fact, a tame cat who likes to sit here on Bloor in Koreatown all day and to please not disturb him. That last part's easy; he acts as if he owns the neighbourhood.

[URBAN NOTE] On East Chinatown

Over at Spacing Toronto, I've come across a post ("The Melancholy of East Chinatown"), by OCAD students Kevin Liu, Jennifer Yim and Houtina Chim, describing the numerous existential problems facing one of Toronto's Chinatowns, arguably one of the least prominent now, East Chinatown located at the intersection of Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street, on the east side of the Don River. They are not positive about the area's future.

Any true Chinatown is an experience for all senses. You smell a concoction of everything from live fish, cardboard boxes full of bok choy, to whiffs of barbecue-sauced pork. You hear the grocery store workers boast of discounts in thick rural Chinese accents, and you see an array of amateur signage in a jumbled assortment of colours and languages. We walk through the intersection of Broadview and Gerrard often, passing by without a second glance. Chinatown is Chinatown, we think to ourselves. But take a closer look into East Chinatown, and you’ll realize that although signs may be up, the interiors are largely empty—reminiscent of what was once a much livelier neighbourhood.

You’ll begin to notice the shops that are left. These mostly tend to be grocery stores and Vietnamese restaurants. The ones that aren’t Vietnamese have remained relatively unchanged for over a decade.

The tale of East Chinatown is one of decline that accelerated ten years ago during Toronto’s bid for the 2008 summer Olympic games. Proposals to build the Olympic village near East Chinatown raised its surrounding property values. But as we all know, in 2001, Toronto lost that bid to Beijing; and in turn, down went the property values until the development of the film studios by the southern Portlands. As land value rose again, the Chinese living in the community took the opportunity to sell their houses for more than double what they originally bought them for and with the returns moved up north amongst the new generation of established Hong Kong immigrants.

Today, you don’t have to go to a Chinatown to get kai lan (Chinese broccoli) or Hoisin sauce. They can be found in T&T Supermarkets or smaller chains of Chinese grocers all across the city. Even some Western grocery stores may stock a good amount of specialized Asian food ingredients.

While the demographic of the surrounding area has changed, the stores largely have not. The newer Chinese generation, the few that are left in the area, are more attracted to the clean and friendly T&T Supermarket on Cherry Street. Many of the new residents that have since moved in have no interest in pirated Hong Kong television dramas, or phone cards, or kai lan. They’re also given an array of food options outside the immediate area that are in direct competition with East Chinatown. They can eat on the Danforth. They can dine, drink espressos and visit galleries on the gentrifying Queen Street East. Or they can drop by the renovated stores at Gerrard Square. For many who walk through East Chinatown, it’s not their intended destination, but the in-between transition zone to a destination.

The discussion in the post's comments are enlightening, pretty much everyone agreeing with the assessment of Chinatown, many arguing that locals just aren't interested in the neighbourhood, many saying that the area needs drastic investment in its appearances and in its sidewalks (among other things) to attract people. A Google search surprisingly few high-quality hits, just links to restaurant reviews and articles describing Toronto's various Chinatowns of which this is only one. My own experience of East Chinatown is vaguely positive, some place near where friends used to live, some place with nice restaurants despite shabby exteriors, but that's really it. The area could certainly use some investment, but it definitely needs some kind of web presence if it doesn't want posts like this one and Spacing's to be all that's out there on the Internet.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On blogging's supposed impending doom

Lately, I've read and heard a lot of people talking about how Livejournal is dying. I'll be shallow and confess that I haven't noticed anything of the kind--look, I still have friends posting!--but if we're talking about one platform fading away for another, I can see that. Nothing's immortal: Remember Friendster? I never bothered. In Thursday's Financial Times, I came across an interesting article by the paper's FT Digital Business editor, Peter Whitehead, questioning whether blogging was not a major phenomenon but just a brief burst of energy, based on some recent statistics suggesting a lull in the blogosphere.

[S]urely the activity of these blogs--let alone their present inactivity--has never been of any real consequence.

Apart from a very small percentage which are informative, original or entertaining, they have little or no value. They are vanity publishing, only made feasible by the removal of costs.

The fact that their creators appear to be giving up on them is hardly surprising, given the amount of time they take to write, to discover and to read. Only a tiny proportion of any working population has this time to spare.

Worthwhile blogs--and there are many of them around--tend, according to my own anecdotal evidence, to be linked to well-known organisations able to provide time and resources, or they have become professional concerns in their own right.

They are also now far more easily discovered, thanks to websites such as Twitter, which enable filtering and highlighting of links to relevant content, according to users’ set criteria.

Whitehead was responding to an article in The Guardian, Charles Arthur's "The long tail of blogging is dying", in which he described how fewer real blogs were linking to The Guardian's website.

[R]ecently--over the past six months--I've noticed a new trend: fewer blogs with links, and fewer with any contextual comment. (I'm defining a blog here as an individual site, whether on Blogger or Wordpress or an individual domain, with regular entries.) Some weeks, apart from the splogs, there would be hardly anything. I didn't think we'd suddenly become dull. Nor was it for want of searching: mining for blog comments, I use Icerocket.com. Technorati.com and Google's Blogsearch.

Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they've all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter. At least with Twitter, one can search for comments via backtweets.com--though it's still quite rare for people to make a comment on a piece in a tweet; more usually it's a "retweet", echoing the headline. The New York Times also noticed this trend, with a piece on 9 June about "Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest", which pointed to Technorati's 2008 survey of the state of the blogosphere, which found that only 7.4m out of the 133m blogs it tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. As the New York Times put it, "that translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned".

I see it: NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When one of them hasn't been updated for 60 days, it turns brown, like a plant dying for lack of water. More and more of the feeds I follow are turning brown. Why? Because blogging isn't easy. More precisely, other things are easier--and it's to easier things that people are turning.

I can buy the idea that the era of hysterical speculation that the blogosphere can destroy journalism--well, at least in their current forms--is ridiculous. I can certainly accept the idea that maintaining a blog takes up a lot of energy and effort that most people wouldn't expend. I do see that a winnowing of the blogosphere is going on, perhaps most bloggers going on to investigate other methods and technologies while others keep trying to work at and improve the traditional format.

One thing that I didn't see either Whitehead or Arthur raise was the possibility that blogging is evolving, merging with other media technologies and spreading its basic techniques to other networks. What else is a Twitter or a Facebook update but a short blog entry letting readers know what they think about a certain thing or what they're doing right now? I know for certain that Facebook also provides utilities which allow everything from the storage and preservation of photos and video to the wave of very annoying game/meme posts which so dominated Livejournal during my first three years here. And sometimes the blogosphere can be brought into this directly: A Bit More Detail exists at http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com, yes, but not only can it also be read by other people without going to my site--through their Livejournal friends pages or through RSS readers--but it can be read by my Facebook friends thanks to a useful utility that imports my posts to that forum, links and photos and all. (Facebook also notifies people when I upload new photos to my Flickr account, too; good, good Facebook.) Facebook is just a really, really big version of Livejournal that can incorporate Livejournal (and Blogger, and Wordpress, and et cetera) alongside its existing blog features.

What is happening to blogging? With something like a quarter-billion reasonably active Facebook users, it's just changing; the old metrics need to be updated, and/or new ones installed, that's all. Nothing to see here.