My personal favorite, The Broadview Lofts, came in second. The lofts, located at Eastern and Broadview, embrace their industrial roots. This allows the neighbourhood to keep its historic feel while at the same time moving forward. Queen St East has been transformed since the completion of the Broadview Lofs. I, for one, can’t think of a better example of one new building having a huge impact on a neighbourhood.

For more information about the 2008 Pug Award winners check out National Post’s story.

There are 21 buildings on their list for voting. Check out HomeZilla’s map of all the locations (or for the geeks, download our Pug Awards KML file and make your own maps mash-up). How many of the buildings did I like? Not many… only 5 of the 21 got a ‘tip of my hat’. This is very unfortunate as these new building are going to be part of Toronto for the next 40, 50, 60 years or more.

The Pug Awards concept is fantastic. This competition gives a voice to the wisdom of crowds to help define the direction of our city, Toronto. Imagine how you would feel if a beautiful new building was added to your neighbourhood. What if it was a terrible building? Architecture can make or break a community. But architecture is subjective, what flies in Toronto won’t work in San Francisco or New York.

6 Laurier Ave

Does winning a Pug Award increase the desirability of a building? Very likely. Young condo owning urbanites want to live in the ‘cool’ building; they don’t want to know that 40,000 of the 50,000 voters hated where they live. Could Pug Awards losers end up en route to becoming a dilapidated building in the style of St. James Town highrises? Probably not, but designers beware. When the wisdom of crowds is unleashed, unexpected results happen.

Make your voice heard… vote in the Pug Awards… let’s tell developers how we want our city to look; results to be annouced June 5th. But remember, just reward those you really love. We don’t want the Toronto Pug Awards to have the same credibility as a Toronto standing ovation.

Open standards are fantastic and will help to ’spur on’ innovation and produce a large amount of geographic annotations. What will we see coming down the pipe? Expect to see a bunch of smaller providers create niche KML files. Examples: real estate agents might produce a KML for their area of expertise, wilderness tour companies creating KML files for their routes, and don’t forget wineries producing KML files of all their vineyards.

Larger companies with huge untapped collections of geospatial data now have a method to share/sell their data with web companies. The big question is how will they monetize this data? KML files are, ultimately, a great way to share geospatial data but as soon as you share it or sell it, nothing stops someone from sharing it with the world.

Web mashups are going to become bigger than ever as more KML files are created. Just think of a world where startups spend time building apps to make data more useful instead of scraping the same data over and over again.

Well, I have to get back to coding but congrats to all the other presenting companies; I can’t wait to meet everyone.

Oh…if you want to reach someone at HomeZilla email: info [@] homezilla [dot] com