[PHOTO] The Tranzac on a snowy Sunday

I took this photograph of Toronto's Tranzac club from the north this Sunday just past. On this afternoon, the Tranzac was hosting a Christmas crafts fair, hence the Santa outside the door.

Located at 292 Brunswick Avenue, just south of Bloor and literally in the middle of The Annex, the Tranzac has an interesting history as a venue for multiple communities.

The Tranzac is a non-profit member supported community organization with a focus on promoting arts, music and theatre. The TRANZAC (an abbreviation of Toronto Australia New Zealand Club) also works to promote and support Australian and New Zealand culture in Toronto.

The Tranzac is open to the public and is home to music and community theatre most nights of the week in our intimate Southern Cross Lounge and our larger Main Hall both with bar service. The Main Hall features a curtained stage and a professional sound system. The smaller Tiki room is available for meetings, performances, poetry readings and other intimate events. The public may rent our club facilities – recently our Main Hall has been packed for music festivals, film festivals, plays, book launchs, CD launches and other concerts and as well as private events such as parties, Bar Mitzvahs, and craft shows.

[. . .]

TRANZAC is the abbreviation of the Toronto Austalia New Zealand Club. Its roots date back to the year 1931, when a small group of Australians and New Zealanders met in the Bay Street (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) offices of J.W. Collins, the New Zealand Trade Commissioner.

Like so many newcomers to Canada, the group wanted to retain a part of their national identity and they formed a group primarily to welcome other Australian and New Zealand newcomers and to help meet the needs of their fellow countrymen by providing social activities, fostering fellowship and goodwill and promoting a better understanding of Canada.

In December 1950, a formal meeting of the group at the King Edward Hotel resulted in the official birth of an Australian New Zealand Club in Toronto. By 1964 the membership had increased to 260 and official club premises were rented on Sherbourne Street.

In 1966 the club was incorporated under the name TRANZAC and the hard working and enthusiastic committee set about working toward securing its own permanent premises. Membership and activities increased and the club moved from establishment to establishment to accommodate members and their friends. Finally, in 1971 all the hard work of the committees and support of the members became a reality and the club was in a position financially to obtain its own premises. TRANZAC moved to its present location at 292 Brunswick Avenue in October 1971.

[META] "Dead Media Beat: The blog is dead, long live the blog"

I found via Bruce Sterling's blog veteran blogger Jason Kottke's essay "The Blog is Dead".

Posted without comment. Thoughts?

[T]he function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.

Instead of launching blogs, companies are building mobile apps, Newsstand magazines on iOS, and things like The Verge. The Verge or Gawker or Talking Points Memo or BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post are no more blogs than The New York Times or Fox News, and they are increasingly not referring to themselves as such.

The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like Facebook and Twitter. If you look at the incoming referers to a site like BuzzFeed, you’ll see tons of traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Pinterest but not a whole lot from blogs, even in the aggregate. For the past month at kottke.org, 14 percent of the traffic came from referrals compared to 30 percent from social, and I don’t even work that hard on optimizing for social media. Sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy aren’t seeking traffic from blogs anymore. Even the publicists clogging my inbox with promotional material urge me to “share this on my social media channels” rather than post it to my blog.

The design metaphor at the heart of the blog format is on the wane as well. In a piece at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal says that the reverse-chronological stream (a.k.a. The Stream, a.k.a. The River of News) is on its way out. Snapchat, with its ephemeral media, is an obvious non-stream app; Madrigal calls it “a passing fog.” Facebook’s News Feed is increasingly organized by importance, not chronology. Pinterest, Digg, and an increasing number of other sites use grid layouts to present information. Twitter is coming to resemble radio news as media outlets repost the same stories throughout the day, ICYMI (in case you missed it). Reddit orders stories by score. The design of BuzzFeed’s front page barely matters because most of their traffic comes in from elsewhere.