Fellow Canuck Andrew “Bravehound” McDonald knows how to put together one hell of a mix. Every few months, he puts together a fantastic music mix with tracks mostly falling into the dance and high energy kind of genres. Glenn is right on the money; they’re great tunes for the gym.

Andrew just finished putting together his latest mix, pretty album art and all, called Show and it doesn’t disappoint. Lots of great tracks in there, but my favourite bit is his description of the compilation, “It’s like a beach party. But at night.”

Download “Show” – Andrew’s new mix at Bravehound.com

It’s been a long time coming since I’ve wanted to bring my own hand into a blog design around here, and as much experience as I’ve had with WordPress, it’s always been a really intimidating prospect. Although I come from a coding background, it’s something that I haven’t really pursued since school, as I went more down the interaction, usability and design route.

After making use of many, many templates, I never really felt they reflected my own aesthetic sense or information architecture in any way. That’s why a few weeks ago when I finally had some runway to get heads down into things, I took a swing at redesigning this humble little blog site!

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Earlier today I did a short talk at Podcamp 2009 about Dear Toronto, our little ol’ video podcast that focuses on all things near and dear to our hearts about our fair city. A handful of people checked it out, and most seemed to enjoy what I had to say about what makes for good, fun, consumable video with a city as its primary subject. Here’s the slides I ran through care of Slideshare:

The slides lose a bit of context since most of them have short excerpts from some of our video along the bottom, but you can probably get the gist of what I was going for. I’ve got a lot to say about this year’s Podcamp, particularly the sessions that seemed to dominate regarding public relations and marketing use of social media, but I’ll leave that as a subject for another post.

You may have seen that Dopplr, the social traveling service recently generated a nice report for President (wow) Obama a little while ago. The report included how much distance the now President of the US had traveled during his campaign for office and how much energy was expended, among other things.

Dopplr has now generated my report and, while significantly exciting than Obama’s, includes some awesome stats, including:

See the full report above. It’s a really cool way of visualizing your travel patterns over the year!

Ever heard of that old story of if the world were a village of 100 people? It’s a simple way of representing percentages of different demographicsaround the world. For instance, “33 villagers would be Christians, 20 would be Muslims”, and “4 would be African, 11 would be European”

I’ve always found this to be an effective way of getting a basic breakdown of so, so many different groups of related objects, but like many things, it’s better represented by an infographic! Thankfully, someone’s done just that in a very interactive, attractive way. The village can be browsed by ‘neighbourhood’ so you can see just the religious, gender, racial, or homosexual parts of statistics. Very cool.

If the world were a village of 100 people (via information aesthetics)

Canadian artist Max Dean’s work focuses heavily on the performance and interactive aspects as well as the experience that the viewer gets when approaching his work. Perhaps best known in Toronto for his Robotic Chair which briefly was on display during Luminato in 2007, Toronto now gets a the chance to take a closer look at Max’s work. Until January 31, more than 40 years worth of his work is on display at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery (451 King St. W) in Toronto. I stopped by on the opening night to experience some of Max’s work. Music by Stars.

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It’s been at least a year since I first came across Seen Reading, a blog run by Torontonian Julie Wilson that I once called "the Gossip Girl of book readers." Since then, Julie has spotted hundreds of readers on the TTC, blogging them in her very unique fashion. Just before Christmas, I tagged along with Julie along the Bloor West subway line to get her take on readers in Toronto. Music by Caribou.

Watch more videos over at Dear Toronto!

Sunset on Christmas Day at my family’s place in Pickering.

I’ve recently really taken an interest in mapping applications, and all things “inforgraphic” as a different way of presenting data. Google has made some major leaps over the years to make their Maps site a really cool way for people to create their own maps, without having to know how to code anything in JavaScript or XML.

That’s why I was thrilled to hear about I Feel Toronto, a site that lets you find places in the city that will jive with how you’re feeling from a list including hungover, sophisticated, chill, girly and broke among others (see also I Feel London and I Feel NYC).

They still have a pretty limited set of places, but I really love how they’ve given each feeling a custom icon and design, along with personal descriptions of each spot and a photo. Bonus points go to them for recently adding “Broke” as a feeling for New York and London! [via Josh Spear]

Gabe Toth is a photographer in Toronto who I’ve known since my early days in blogging, and he does some incredible portrait photography, so I was happy to come by and document his latest photoshoot with Superstein’s John Walke. Fair warning – this video is probably a little not safe for work seeing that Superstein was doing a shoot for some new underwear designs they’re releasing. Music by Crystal Castles.

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