August 29, 2010 • TwitsMag Canada, Twitter Toronto • Comments
All info for anything around you is in twitter411.ca
Follow the weather reports and roads in Toronto and in Canada!!
July 12, 2010 • TwitsMag Canada, Twitter Canada, Twitter Events, Twitter Toronto • Comments
Thousands of fans around the world filled the streets and tapped their keyboards to celebrate Spain’s dramatic World Cup victory over the Netherlands.
Canada
Not a maple flag in sight as red and yellow filled the streets of Canada’s major cities on Sunday following Spain’s overtime victory against Holland in the 2010 World Cup finals. While celebrations were reported in many of Canada’s major cities, the most lively crowds were in Toronto where thousands of fans packed the city’s financial district to watch the match on huge video displays.
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Nearby, along the popular College Street, the final whistle prompted hundreds of fans to rush to the streets to sing, dance and jump aboard any vehicle that passed.
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United States
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Football, or as it is known locally “soccer,” is not usually a cause for street celebrations in the United States but Sunday marked a dramatic exception as thousands of Spanish football fans turned out to celebrate across the country. From New York to San Francisco, Americans turned their attention from the typical summer sports ritual of baseball to take in the World Cup finals. In California, pubs such as “Mad Dog in the Fog” were packed with mid-day crowds cheering along the Spaniards. Elswhere, thousands of fans gathered in the city’s government district to watch the match on huge TV screens.
Posted on YouTube by slysen
While across the country, in New York City, Spanish fans roared on what’s typically a calm Sunday afternoon on Columbus Circle along the city’s Upper Westside.
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Norway
In Scandinavia, huge crowds turned out under a late-night summer sunset to watch the Spanish victory. Thousands of fans watched the game in central Oslo on Sunday and burst into cheers following Spain’s overtime goal.
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While many celebrated outdoors and in bars around the world, hundreds of thousands of other Spanish supporters rushed online to express their excitement about being the new World Cup champions. Social networking services like Facebook, You Tube, and most notably, Twitter were flooded with celebratory messages.
On Twitter, there are a number of lively discussions going on among users from around the world:
July 1, 2010 • TwitsMag Canada, Twitter Canada, Twitter Toronto • Comments
Canada Celebrating 143 Years
June 22, 2010 • Twitter Events, Twitter Politics, Twitter Toronto • Comments
Article Source: National Post
With this weekend’s G8 and G20 Summits almost upon us, we’ve created a new National Post Twitter feed called @g20updates. On it, we’re serving up all the latest news and analysis on this weekend’s summit in Huntsville and Toronto.
This feed will also feature live files from our staff on breaking developments, disruptions and more news from ground level once the summit itself kicks off on Friday.
Follow us now @g20updates and stay connected!
February 28, 2010 • TwitsMag Canada, Twitter Canada, Twitter Toronto • Comments
Canada has won a gold medal with a 3-2 overtime win over the USA in Men’s Olympic Hockey. Sidney Crosby scored the game winner for Team Canada.
Hero
After the USA tied up the game with Zach Parise goal with 24 seconds left, the game was forced to overtime. Sidney Crosby, Canada’s captain, had been quiet all game long until he won gold for Canada on one shot in overtime.
The gold medal means Canada has broken the Olympic gold medal record in an Olympic Games with 14.
The buzz for this game was incredible as the friendly neighbours renew their rivalry for the second time of this Olympics tournament. Team USA walked away with a 5-3 win over the Canadians when they met early on in the tournament, a shocking win for a young team with few expectations.
Team Canada was questioned after the loss, with many saying the Canadians were a disappointment for Vancouver 2010. After 4 consecutive wins and a gold medal, the Canadians put those questions to rest.
.. the goal.. the highest record of GOLD medals..awesome
February 17, 2010 • Social Networking, TwitsMag Canada, Twitter Canada, Twitter People, Twitter Toronto • Comments
TORONTO (Reuters) – For tech-savvy singles who are unlucky in love, shy or just looking for a new way to meet people, Flitter could be the answer.
Hundreds of singles attended the first Flitter parties across Canada last week in the latest dating game which is a play on words of the microblogging site Twitter and flirting.
Each guest wore a white sticker with a number and gazed closely at their iPhones and Blackberrys in a dimly lit room in Toronto, their thumbs tapping away at their mobile devices on Twitter.
They were Flittering and trying to catch the attention of other tweeters who were flying solo on the eve of Valentine’s Day.
“#129, you’re so fine, but #152, you’re hot too. Man oh man, what will #72 do?” tweeted one guest as the comment showed up on a giant projector screen set up inside the venue.
Will Lam, a 27-year old banking professional and Twitter fanatic, attended the event because he was interested in seeing how Flitter worked.
“I was just wondering how they would leverage Twitter and facilitate interaction between people,” said Lam, who found the tweeting to be awkward and distracting in his attempts to strike up conversations with women.
“I actually tweeted #19 was really cute, but I can’t even find her anymore,” he said.
But Halley Trusler, a 23-year old event co-ordinator who recently moved to Toronto, found Flittering to be a great way to meet people.
“It allows people who are a little more shy to put themselves out there,” she said.
Trusler received plenty of tweets offering to buy her drinks and revealed she may have someone in mind by the end of the night.
The tweeter can choose to sign off with his, or her, assigned number or send an anonymous message or compliment. The recipient can respond and meet the tweeter if interested, or just read the anonymous compliment and move on.
All senders must end the tweet with the word “Flitterme.”
Justin Parfitt, founder and CEO of Fastlife, the Canadian-based dating service provider, originated Flitter singles events in Australia and introduced them to North America.
He thought there must be some way of getting people to interact using work devices, such as their Blackberrys or iPhones, to make people feel social as oppose to anti-social.
The Flitter parties, which were also held in Vancouver, Ottawa and Montreal, were advertised on the Internet.
February 2, 2010 • Misc, Social Networking, Twitter Canada, Twitter Toronto, Twitter follow me • Comments
TORONTO – The Ontario Provincial Police force is the latest police agency to join the social media movement by opening a Twitter account.
Police forces in several Canadian cities, including Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, along with the RCMP, have Twitter accounts. The Ontario force says its account (at www.twitter.com/OPP-News) will include news releases and other messages.
Some Canadian police forces have already used social network sites to help catch suspects.
Many have used YouTube to show crime scene surveillance tapes or to broadcast appeals to suspects to turn themselves in.
Last summer, Toronto police reportedly used Twitter to monitor chatter from Tamil protesters who shut down a major highway.
A U.S. social media consultant visited Canada last year to teach police how to make better use of social networking sites to fight crime, including setting up fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter to track sexual predators and gang members.
Lauri Stevens told the CBC during her visit that police “make connections that way (and) get inside that world, and go from there.”
February 1, 2010 • Social Networking, TwitsMag Canada, Twitter Canada, Twitter Toronto • Comments
TORONTO — Little or no grammar teaching, cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, all are being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can’t write properly.
For years there’s been a flood of anecdotal complaints from professors about what they say is the wretched state of English grammar coming from some of their students.
Now there seems to be some solid evidence.
Ontario’s Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills.
Almost a third of those students are failing.
“Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level,” says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University.
“We would certainly like it to be a lot lower.”
Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.
“What has happened in high school that they cannot pass our simple test of written English, at a minimum?” she asks.
Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, “still can’t pass our simple test,” she says.
Poor grammar is the major reason students fail, says Barrett.
“If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that’s a problem.”
Some students in public schools are no longer being taught grammar, she believes.
“Are they (really) preparing students for university studies?”
At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, one in 10 new students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation.
That 10 per cent must take so-called “foundational” writing courses first.
Simon Fraser is reviewing its entrance requirements for English language.
“There has been this general sense in the last two or three years that we are finding more students are struggling in terms of language proficiency,” says Rummana Khan Hemani, the university’s director of academic advising.
Emoticons, happy faces, sad faces, cuz, are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser.
“Little happy faces … or a sad face … little abbreviations,” show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani.
“Instead of ‘because’, it’s ‘cuz’. That’s one I see fairly frequently,” she says, and these are new in the past five years.
Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written “because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style.”
Professors are seeing their share of bad grammar in essays as well.
“The words ‘a lot’ have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. ‘Definitely’ is always spelled with an ‘a’ -’definitely’. I don’t know why,” says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.
“Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none.”
He is floored by some of what he sees.
“I get their essays and I go ‘You obviously don’t know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words’,” said Budra.
Then he’s reduced to teaching basic grammar to them himself.
He says this has been going on now for the 20 years he’s taught college and university in B.C. and Ontario-only the mistakes have changed.
He too blames poor – or no – grammar instruction in lower schools.
“When I went to high school in the ’70s I was never taught grammar in English. I learned grammar from Latin classes.”
Budra was taught to read and write using whole language rather than phonetics – not a good way to go in his books.
“We haven’t taught grammar for 30-40 years…(and it) hasn’t worked.”
“It’s not that hard to teach basic grammar,” he says.
Ontario’s Ministry of Education says grammar is a part of both its elementary and high school curriculum.
Cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills, say even experts in the field.
“I think it has,” says Joel Postman, author of “SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate,” who has taught Fortune 500 companies how to use social networking.
The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an email to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one’s career if used at work.
“It would say to me … ‘well, this person doesn’t think very clearly, and they’re not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they’re not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can’t spell, they can’t punctuate,’ ” he says.
“These folks are going to short-change themselves, and right or wrong, they’re looked down upon in traditional corporations,” notes Postman.
But “spelling is getting better because of Spellcheck,” says Margaret Proctor, University of Toronto writing support co-ordinator.
James Turk of the Association of University Teachers takes all the complaints about student literacy with a grain of salt.
“There’s a notion of a golden age in the past that students were wonderful, unlike now. I’m not sure that golden age ever existed,” he says.
“You can go back and read Plato and see Socrates talking about the allegations that this generation isn’t as not as good as previous ones,” he notes.
November 15, 2009 • TwitsMag Canada, Twitter Canada, Twitter People, Twitter Statistics, Twitter Toronto, Twitter follow me • Comments
This list was archived from mfinch.ca and it was last updated on April the 3rd 2009, for sure the followers and the updates have increased significantly but, it’s a good idea to check the top 60 Canadian twitter users 
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters[verification needed] in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can send and receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS (receive only), or through applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twitterfon, TweetDeck and feedalizr. The service is free to use over the web, but using SMS may incur phone services provider fees.
November 12, 2009 • TwitsMag Canada, Twitter Canada, Twitter Events, Twitter Toronto, Twitter tweets • Comments
In this era of smartphones and the Internet, the federal elections agency is struggling to enforce a rule that bans the general broadcasting of voting results until all the polls have closed.
As Canadians in four electoral districts spread right across the giant country cast ballots on Monday to fill vacant seats in the House of Commons, Elections Canada asked a newspaper to remove from its website a story revealing initial results from one constituency where voting had ended early.
The agency did not notice reporters had been discussing the same by-election results on the microblogging network Twitter, which is accessible across Canada.
One journalist even sent a Twitter message saying “Oh dear. Have just realized I may have been violating law because of my poor understanding of Twitter”. Elections Canada did nothing.
It is little wonder that critics use terms like absurd and archaic to describe a provision that, in large part, comes from an era before the Internet was born.
The rule — part of the Canada Elections Act — aims to prevent abuses in the world’s second largest country. Canada has six time zones, which means results from the East start to come in while polls are still open in the rest of the country.
To head off the chance that the majority could somehow be influenced by early voting, media organizations are banned from nationally broadcasting any results until the last polling station has closed.
That said, television and radio stations can broadcast regional results as long as the signal is contained within that region. But this fails to take into account that a voter out West with the right kind of satellite dish can access an eastern station broadcasting results.
And of course, posting data on the Internet is easy.
It is no surprise therefore that the rule has failed to prevent a string of breaches, some deliberate and some accidental, in federal elections over the last decade.
“Elections Canada is still stuck in this dark age, they’re trying to be Big Brother,” said Peter Coleman, president of the National Citizens Coalition, a right-leaning lobby group advocating the end of the restriction.
“Technology has changed so much that they can’t stop this stuff from going on anyway … I think it’s an archaic law and it should just disappear,” he told Reuters on Tuesday.
Only one person has ever been prosecuted and he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court before losing in 2007. The judges said “maintaining public confidence in the electoral system requires some method of restraining publication of election results until most or all Canadians have voted”. Read More >>>>>>
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