Scrawled in Wax

Recently, after years of scattered complaining, the Toronto tech world finally got the cover story it deserved: a stinging indictment in NOW Magazine that suggested that, despite a wealth of advantages, the city has failed to capitalise on any of its tech potential. While Silicon Valley and Alley are creating jobs, services and new methods to empower people, Toronto lags.

The issue is obviously complicated: it encompasses infrastructure, government policy, the university system and, some would argue, the lack of a robust entrepreneurial culture in Canada. But one aspect that I believe gets overlooked is the lack of any central tech-culture websites to consolidate and focus all the energy here. While the high use of Twitter in Toronto has done a lot to cement a sense of a ‘tech community’, we still have a long way to go, and let’s be honest: Scrawled in Wax ain’t gonna’ help.

There might be reason for hope, though. Two recent happenings – the launches of Mondoville and Required Reading – seem to augur good things for developing a web/blogger culture in Toronto.

Mondoville, which is looking pretty good, was launched by Toronto media gadfly Marc Weisblott. Tweeting under the name @scroll, he relentlessly critiques Toronto media’s inability to react quickly enough to the web or create new media entities. While it’s true that he can be a bit of an asshole sometimes (sorry Marc, it’s true), he’s doing a heck of a lot more good than most, and he has a solid understanding of the web and its culture.

Mondoville is very Gawker-like. It’s pop, focused on celebrity, but smart and snarky, and carries with it that hard-to-describe ‘web vibe’ – irony, wit, pastiche etc. The design is clean, and the homepage has a tracker for popular trending Twitter topics in Toronto, which adds to the sense that it’s a ‘destination site’. The only real critique I would level at it is that it follows the “let’s start another blog” model. I would have liked to see some form of melding social-networking and blog a la Gdgt, or at least a new-ish approach like Mediaite.

Still, the more important thing is that it’s a place for web-savvy Torontonians to see their city’s place in a larger culture. So frequently, our conception of where we live is dependent upon its representation in the public sphere. And how many movies or novels or games are about Toronto? Almost none, right? So I think that’s a bigger deal than it sounds. I often wonder if Toronto so frequently feels like the city that almost-could because there is a sense Toronto doesn’t exist in global culture the way it should. More to the point, public visions of local culture give us something to share – something that we desperately lack.

And often, the things we share are the things we read. That’s what I love about Kate Carraway’s new Required Reading blog on Eye. Required Reading is a link blog that passes on cool, smart interesting things around the web that Carraway has recently discovered. But the thing I like about it isn’t the links themselves. Rather, somewhat like Rex Sorgatz’s Fimoculous, it’s the vibe produced by the aggregated collection of links, combined with the witty commentary, that makes it great. It’s like a snapshot of contemporary culture. Posts on one day will contain links to Douglass Rushkoff on economics and an amazing piece on the rebirth of Hamilton; on another, we get links to stories on rapper Drake, or a smart, almost implied take on modern feminism. Plus, because Carraway isn’t a ‘web insider’, you get charming revelations like finding a blog about some mommy named Dooce, who’s “apparently very popular”. It’s great.

More to the point, it consolidates the stuff that smart, savvy, privileged people in Toronto are reading. It puts it somewhere. And it’s consistently good. To me, that’s a big deal for a city so full of clever, talented people that seems to be searching for an identity. And what I hope is that it’s a start – or expansion – of a blogger, techie community in this city that I’ve decided to call home.

I’d be curious to hear what other Torontonians think. If you get a chance to look at the sites, hit the comments and let me know.