If Metblogs is a city, hub.metblogs is the playground. We kept hearing from people that one of their favorite parts of Metblogs was meeting and interacting with readers and writers from other parts of the world, as well as getting requests for more ways that readers could be involved besides just posting comments. We thought about this for a while and decided that with a network like this, a giant community area where folks from all over the world could hang out, post photos and videos, talk with each other, form groups, play games, send messages, and do about a million other things was probably a pretty fun idea. The Hub is that.

If you have any tech ideas or suggestions join this group and speak up. See you on hub.metblogs!

Hi everyone,

This is Kay writing. I’m not new to Vienna (was raised in the suburb but have been studying, working and living here for.. quite a while now), but brand spanking new to Metblogs – at least as an author, not so much as a reader!

There are LOTS of things I’m interested, so I’ll just name a few important ones:
music (independent as well as popular music – sorry, I can’t dismiss “mainstream” entirely!), photography (my main hobby at the moment), film, music video, advertising, gender & queer topics, new media, net culture, all sorts of subcultures, the UK/British English et cetera et cetera. I’m pretty tech-savvy but not as (obviously!) present online as others (.. the whole Big Brother thing, you know..), also: I’m lacking some of the cool gadgets that’d properly make me part of the “scene” (I sure wish I had a MacBook, though!).

I guess – can’t say for sure yet, but I guess – I’ll mostly be posting about the “little things” that I come across here in Vienna. Things that affect or simply become part of our everyday lives – without us noticing or anyone else posting about them. :P

Well, I think that’s it for now!
Already looking forward to being an active part of Metroblogging Vienna!

Cheers everyone,
k.

…and it’s quite possible that I’ll be metroguestblogging around…
I’ll start in Toronto.

So, see you!

And RSS shall be your one true god.

As you might know, Metroblogging is a network of sites – currently, we cover 44 different cities on the globe, spanning from Bangkok to Berlin, from Lahore to Los Angeles and from Tokyo to Toronto. Many of you are probably interested in what goes on around the globe, not only in your city, but that means 44 sites to check, right?

Wrong – may I proudly present, our world feed – all the articles from all the cities in one nice RSS feed. Add this to your feed reader, and you’re always up to date. And in case you belong to the 88% of all internet users that have never even heard of RSS, well, get cracking already! As the marketing guys says, it’s fun, it’s free, and it’s feeding all the things you should or want to know right into your computer. Read more here, get a RSS reader there, and ba-zing!, you’re done.

Well, first of all, ashes on my head for not posting much lately – my camera is still broken, and so is my free time on account of exam hell and other such things. Anyway, you might have noticed that the Metblogs network has been constantly growing, but as of today we have another member in the Metblogs Europe posse – cheers to Dublin and their fine team :)

Together with Berlin, Istanbul, Paris and London, this now makes 6 European cities in the network – and we’re not even nearly done yet. And as soon as I have my camera back, I’ll post some more interesting stuff. Talking about that, as an addition to Scotts nostalgia story, let me share something I witnessed a few days ago:

I was sleeping over at a friends place at Valentines day, and at around 11:00, the doorbell rang. A fragile, elderly lady was standing there, offering my friend some cookies – that was the nice part. Then she started rambling for half an hour about how there’s way too much noise coming from my friends’ flat, and how horrible it is that he always moves furniture and showers at 2 a.m. (which he doesn’t) and that she will have to call the police if this goes on.

My friend told me afterwards that this happens about once per week – either it’s the old woman rambling for half an eternity, or it’s her senile husband, bringing the same story, but shouting rather than whining. He also constantly tries to get into the flat. So, while I can’t say that insane oldsfolk are a Viennese speciality, I can confirm that they are quite widespread here. Did I ever tell you about the old witch who accused another friend of mine of running a brothel because she had the light on at night and owned bookcases? Funny times.

Another year, another list. I’d like to bring you some of the more interesting or funny Vienna Metblog 2005 facts here, straigt from our trusty statistics department – well, actually it’s just a perl script, but then, who can tell the difference anyway? Anyway, here goes:

* We had readers from over 25 different countries, and I’d like to send a shout out to the one guy in Norway and that other guy in Saudi Arabia who read us. And to the tens of thousands of other people who do, too, of course.

* 20.2% of our readers use a different operating system than Windows (Mainly OS X, Linux and FreeBSD), and 40.6% use a browser different than Internet Explorer – Firefox takes a strong second place with 20.7%, followed by Safari, the Mozilla browser and Opera.

* 3 out of 4 readers come here directly or via a bookmark, the rest found us thru search engines – it won’t be a surprise to anyone that Google rocks this department, delivering 3 times more readers than MSN who came in second, followed by Yahoo and others.

* Our top referrer this year is *drum roll* – The Guardian! An English newspaper, of all things… oh well. They linked our story about the Gelatin bunny, which obviously interested a lot of people. As another sign of international link goodness, referrer #2 is a polish newspaper, unfortunately their article is no longer online. Cheers to 49Media, Second Silence, Enlarge Your Pen (Prost nach Graz), Wooster Collective, Ostracised from

yet another city has joined the network.
say hello to mumbai!
for those of you who don’t know (that was including me 20 secs ago) it’s the new name for the town formerly known as bombay.

there’s presents for the metbog network and it’s readers.
enjoy the new blogs covering singapore and paris.
that makes 39!
folks in non-metblog-cities on this planet: get your arse up and make them 40!

If you look right above this entry, you will see a nice, friendly banner saying “Metblogs reader survey”. After almost one and a half years, we are conducting our first global reader survey – so please go head, click on the link and take those few minutes to fill it out. There’s no catch, no scam, it’s completely anonymous and would help us out a lot. Thanks!

Christian, one of our more loyal readers, wrote a comment about the obvious leftist orientation of the Vienna metroblog. I’d like to offer a few thoughts on that.

First, one of the nice things about being a blogger is that, unlike a regular journalist, you don’t have to aim for absolute objectivity. We can bring our own personal views into the texts we write, as long as we don’t try to sell them as facts, which, hopefully, we don’t.

Second, back when the Vienna Metroblog was launched, I had to find 10 people willing and able to write, and I had to do it fast, because I was afraid that otherwise, the whole project would have to be filed under “Could have been”. So naturally, I asked around in my circle of friends, which, unsurprisingly, consists mostly of people with left-from-center political views. And all the people who applied for the Metblog since then listed themselves as either unpolitical or leftist, except for that one guy who described his political views as “GNU”, but I won’t tell you who that was. :)

In short, neither is the Metroblog a leftist publication by design, nor do we keep out people with other political views out – it’s just that we never had any conservatives or moderates who wanted to write for us.

In addition, I’d be hard pressed to name even one right-wing, conservative or otherwise non-leftist Viennese blog right now, although I’m sure they exist. So, if you feel like metroblogging, but never applied for it because you thought this is a leftists-only club and your political views don’t match our own, please, now is your chance! Sign up today, and make this blog a more balanced place.