If you’ve heard whisperings (or read bloggings!) about our Vancouver beta site, your ear to the ground is hearing right! We’re on the move, and heading west.

If you live in the Vancouver area, used to live in the Vancouver area, or just love the Vancouver area (or know folks who do), here’s how you can help lay the foundation for Van’s own second-to-none collaborative city guide and source of all things worth telling about:

1. Share your whole collection of local favourites! For 50+ faves, not only will you be an original faverati, but you’ll earn an honorarium (for hitting those fave places!), bragging rights, and endless gratitude! Interested? Get in touch with me - robin@ourfaves.com, and we’ll get you started!

2. Share your top five! Have but a handful of local gems to share? Go ahead and tease us! There’s nothing wrong with the slow build to a complete collection of fabulous faves. Ready to go? robin@ourfaves.com is your fixer.

3. Invite your friends! We figure they must be at least as city-savvy as you, and that’s good. If they want in, we’d love to meet them. For a password to peruse and fave, all it takes is an email to robin@ourfaves.com.

4. Be a Featured Faver! Have a penchant for public art, or a line on the best eggs benny in each city region? Do you have some special expertise that would inform a great collection of topical faves? Then you belong on our home page! To apply, you know who to get in touch with.

5. Recommend a Featured Faver! Have a friend that fits the above description? Or know of a Van community member in the public eye, or particularly knowledgeable, who’s faves you’re dying to know? Let us know! We’ll do our best to make it happen. Or if you have a mighty influence, get them to contact us. You know where.

6. Be our Inaugural Community Leader! We are looking for one connected and passionate Community Leader to help grow the OurFaves Vancouver community over the coming months, and build enthusiasm for sharing the best of local online. Sound like you? Find out more here:

http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/wri/688493548.html

7. Tell Us What You Think! We love to listen and want to know how we can we make Ourfaves Vancouver your fave! Share your feedback at www.vancouver.ourfaves.com/feedback or email Robin at robin@ourfaves.com

You know we recently turned one, but did you know we’re having a party! Well we are! And you’re invited.

We’re busy planning a great shindig for all the people who have helped to make the site so great - fans, contributors, OurFaves team members and friends of all kinds.

The theme? Why, city faves of course! We’re planning a party that incorporates as many of your faves as we can, and that means you’re gonna love it. From a much-faved venue to your fave foods, Toronto-centric music chosen by Tdot DJs, to interactive activities you can play for super cool prizes from the faviest places, to all your fave people from the site and the city - this is a party about Toronto, and what makes it so unique, energized and fun.

Sound good? Then read on, and see you there!

Toronto is delightfully awash in online recommendations of the fave persuasion! That’s right, in just over a year, you’ve big upped 10,000 places and things that you think people oughta know about. And folks - you know your city stuff, inside and out!

It’s a big milestone, and we hope it means you’re loving getting in on this online ode to the Tdot, and  showing no signs of stopping.

Thanks to everyone who believes in local features and enterprises, better exploring the places where we live, connecting people, tuning to unexpected sources for the best of the best info, and the community building thrust of the site that makes us so passionate about what we do.

Keep on favin’!

Last week I got the chance to head down to Van city to start spreading the word that Ourfaves is coming. I had the most fantastic couple of days meeting amazing, passionate Vancouver-ites and faving some of the best places in Van city.

The first night I was in town, I got the chance to take part in SteakCamp which was a challenge put out to the blogger community to eat the $8.99 steak at the Brave Bull, a very sketchy looking place. It was an adventure of the not so fave-worthy but fantastic nonetheless as I got to spend the night with a few of Van city’s digital media crew including Tom Williams from Givemeaning.org and some of Van city’s best bloggers including Lisa from Mostlylisa, Raul from Hummingbird604 and Karen from Tiny Bites. So we braved the Brave Bull and survived.

On Tuesday night, we threw our first Ourfaves Vancouver meetup at the wonderfully fave-worthy Soma.
We had over 30 people come out and fave the city out loud. Soma was chosen as the venue, as one of our first and most awesome contributors on the Vancouver site, Myles had faved this hot spot for best wine bar and it really was fantastic.

They offer a selection of meats, cheeses, tapas and fabulous wines.

The “i fave VAN” pins were a huge hit, thanks to SixCentPress for making those pins happen in less than 24 hours!

There was a real wide range of people who came out but they all had one thing in common, they really do love Vancouver! We had such amazing conversations about all the amazing things and places and hiddden gems the city has to offer, it made me want to move there. People seemed to love the idea of building community around favourite things and places and I am so excited to see all these new faces on Ourfaves Vancouver soon. Thanks to everyone for coming out including Lisa from Mostlylisa.com, Karen from Tinybites, Raul from Hummingbird604.com and everyone else who made it such a fun evening.

See you at the next event, favin’ folks … and around the site of course!

Interested in getting involved in the Vancouver beta community? See the next post on how you can!

Last year, the OurFaves gang has a super time attending the mesh conference - hearing some of the world’s foremost technical, marketing, media, and creative innovators speak on where the web is headed and how technology is influencing society, business, and all sectors of creativity and communication.

At last year’s mesh, OurFaves had launched only a couple of weeks before the conference. This year, we’re really looking forward to spreading the word about how the site has grown, and connecting with and learning from even more amazing thinkers and doers who are harnessing the power of the internet in new ways.

Other exciting stuff: our own Candice Faktor, creator of OurFaves and GM of both OurFaves and toronto.com will be speaking on one of the panels, alongside Pema Hegan of GigPark and Daniel Burka of Digg.com. The topic of the panel will be The New Front Page, and here’s what it’s all about:

In the past, the front page of the newspaper or the TV news was our main source of information. Now, as media becomes social, we are just as likely to see a link on Digg or StumbleUpon, or get sent one through Pownce, or see one on a friend’s blog. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Some feel this is making us more narrow in our interests, as we see only the content our friends agree is important, but others see these “recommendation engines” as a positive thing. Join Daniel Burka of Digg, Pema Hegan of GigPark and Candice Faktor of OurFaves in a discussion about how the Web is the new front page, moderated by Mathew Ingram.

We hope to see some of you there! And if web/society 2.0 and 3.0 are of interest to you, we’d highly recommend you come.

Ourfaves is 1 year old today - Yeeeeeeehaaaa! What a great feeling to reach 1 years old and to be growing strong - we hit a record traffic month again for April 08! Thank you so much to everyone who has helped make ourfaves.com the awesome community it is  - without you, Ourfaves would not be useful at all. Stay tuned as a party to celebrate is in the works - can’t wait to share the deets soon. I couldn’t ask for a better way to celebrate our birthday than to see all the amazing momentum that is building at ourfaves.com. In the past month, our team has doubled in size, the enthusiasm and energy in the office is totally contagious, we have some amazing plans to build out the platform and the community, local businesses are giving us the nod on what a great job we are doing spreading word of mouth online, we are eagerly getting other cities ready to launch and the original team is back at it! So happy birthday to us - and thanks to everyone for getting us here - we can’t wait for Year 2!

It seems like only yesterday we announced the birth of a tiny beta, launched into the web 2.0 world by its committed young creators - all of whom really had no idea what to expect next.

In a year’s time we’ve gone from a fledgling community to a site with over 2300 registered users, nearly 10,000 fave entries, and 170,000 unique visitors this month alone. We’d really like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all the enthusiastic contributors and OurFaves community members, the many awesome people who have helped to build, grow and support the site, and to all of Toronto for just being so damn amazing and fave-worthy.

The OurFaves crew hit the town a couple times this week in celebration of a great year, and a great city.

Have a look at some photos from our adventures at the SummerCamp Dance Party at CiRC A, a super event that brought together Toronto’s art, design, communications, technology, media, social change and entrepreneurship communities. And peek in at our night at the “I GET T.O.” party at the Gladstone - a night celebrating Jane Jacobs’ legacy and spring in the city, co-sponsored by Green Enterprise Toronto and PEN Canada.

And get set for more fun in the city - we’ll soon be announcing plans for our birthday party! Stay tuned.

We are thrilled to announce that Wendy Goldman has decided to join the Ourfaves team as Editorial and Community Coordinator. Wendy did such a great job as an intern on toronto.com that we couldn’t let her go! Her passion, enthusiasm, talented journalism and new media skills made her the perfect fit for our team. We have some amazing projects that we can’t wait to get started when Wendy starts which fortunately for us is on Monday!

…our new hire, Tim Leung joins us! I am so excited to announce that we have hired one of the best
young developers and product people I know. Tim is no stranger to Ourfaves, having worked as a summer student on the project in its earliest days of conception. Tim couldn’t stay away even while at school and worked on a part time basis helping us. We haven’t had Tim work on Ourfaves for over a year and so we are super excited to have him join us full time. This means great things for the Ourfaves
platform. Tim is resting up and vacationing this week as he knows there is some hard work and hard play ahead. 3 days and counting till he arrives!

We have printed some really awesome stickers for businesses that have been faved on our site. We are super excited about sharing Ourfaves place pages of faves with businesses. Most businesses will likely not know that our site exists yet and that they have users who absolutely love particular things about their establishment. What a great good news story to share. We are just finishing up printing the stickers and we will be in market by the next week visiting the top 50 places faved on our site with some good news about how much the people of Toronto love their business.

I am really excited to hear what these business owners have to say and to see ourfaves.com “static clings” (aka stickers that don’t permanently stick) be placed in some of my fave store windows around town. This program really embodies what ourfaves is all about - community, supporting local businesses, being in the know about the best and highlighting the real specialities that people may not know about a place. I am hoping these stickers get people talking and engaging with the businesses about what is favorite at their establishment.

Can’t wait to start spreading the word and look forward to sharing some of our encounters with faved local businesses with you!