BlogTO launched a new look today. It’s a bit awkward but they have a good team and will iron out some of the bugs. I think this is part of a larger change in strategy of the site away from a pure “blog” to more of a “destination” site. There’s a large vacuum in the “Toronto portal” market with the mismanagement at Toronto.com (seriously, does anyone use this site anymore?) – BlogTO looks like they are positioning themselves to take up more of that space.

Offered quite a while ago, but they recently got my attention again. Spacing magazine has been selling these buttons which represent the tile art and font used by the TTC on all their stations. They can be purchased directly from Spacing or at Swipe Books.

As part of Boston.com’s Big Picture series, they posted some fantastic photography from this years games: Vancouver 2010, part 1 of 2 – The Big Picture – Boston.com.

Full Screen Weather is a project brought to you by the weather-nerds at Weather Underground. A longtime favorite site of mine, it gives more accurate weather here-and-now. The full-screen Google Maps mashup with weather input from multiple stations on the ground gives a very clear picture of weather across the GTA.

Unfortunately the Canadian maps do not show precipitation, but I hope that will change soon.

Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world, however it’s amazing how it makes most of it’s money on just a few products. The Office and Windows products far outweigh any contribution by all their other services, including all of their online ventures, mobile ventures, hardware and gaming.

Playing a Facebook game like Farmville or Mafia Wars? Prevent those apps from littering your friend’s feeds by blocking them.

• Go to Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites.
• For “Activity on Application and Games”, choose “Custom”
• Select “Only Me”

Like the USA did in 2007, Canada is investigating the real estate listing service and filing to make changes to allow more access to consumers and more choice in types of real estate services. When the changes were made south of the border, the real estate market really opened up for new entrants and costs became much lower for people listing their homes. Hopefully we will get similar changes and choices.

The TTC quietly released the beta version of it’s trip planner a few days ago. I’ve tried it and it seems to be pretty accurate. Give it a shot if you’re taking the TTC somewhere and need to find out a route.

Engadget did something very interesting today. They turned off comments on their blog. This reverses a trend that’s been happening for the last few years.

What started in the blogsphere and forums has been rolled out to almost every major news outlet in North America. All the Canadian national newspapers and TV stations allow “comments” on their stories from users. Most of the sites have been redesigned to get these comments a lot of screen real estate.

I find the comments utterly useless. The anonymity afforded by these systems bring out the worst in people. Most of the major outlets have to strictly moderate the comments, and it’s extremely rare that any comment at all is worth reading.

While I’m glad Engadget turned off commenting, they’re still committed to it and are going to turn it back on after the cooling off period. I’m hoping that the comments sections of the major outlets get less prominance and they’re reliance of them to increase traffic to decrease.

Fortune ranked the top 100 employers. The statistics and information are based on the US, but many of these companies do operate in Canada.