But that’s all beside the point. I found a neat tool online that lets you compare your neighborhood to other neighborhoods in well-known cities across the country. Needless to say, I promptly looked up to see where I fit in with my LA folk and if I did an upgrade or downgrade (but I didn’t see Warren or my old LA ‘hood listed… so I’m kinda shady on where I stand still). For example: Detroit to LA, Detroit to NYC (Manhattan), or Detroit to Chicago just to name a few of the examples you can do.

Check it out and see where you would fit in if you lived somewhere else – you might be a little surprised.

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!

Are you freakin’ kidding me?

Ah man, please don’t tell me how many thousands more hits they probably get than Metbloggin’ Detroit.

Also known as “KL”, Kuala Lumpur has a population of 1.8 million people and is the capital and largest city in Malaysia.

If you have a few minutes today, stop by Kuala Lampur’s Metroblogging site and give its authors and audience a warm Detroit welcome.

Stop by and say hi if you have a minute or two today.

Food-fanatic or not, Detroit’s Eastern Market is a hidden gem – a unique city staple we’re lucky to have.

Located on Russell Street near Gratiot, Eastern Market’s vendors and shops offer nutritious, inexpensive selections, plus tasty meats and cheeses, homemade breads, wine, beer, flowers, antiques and so much more.

Sure, other cities have markets – DC even has its own Eastern Market – but how many have been around since 1841?

And how many are as big as the D’s Eastern? I’m not sure if this is still true, but the 2000 edition of The Detroit Almanac says Detroit’s Eastern Market is the biggest open-air wholesale-retail market in the U.S.

Friendly competition aside, Detroit’s Eastern Market is just a flat-out cool place, one I wish everyone could enjoy. There’s something about heading to the market on Saturdays, spending a few hours with 45,000+ locals in this unique pocket of Detroit that feels like another world. It’s an experience like no other.

For pictures of Detroit’s market, check out the Flickr Eastern Market Photo Pool

Tags: Metblogs7Gifts 7Gifts Metroblogging7Gifts

Each city has its own “gift list” and Detroit’s will be published on this site. If you’d like to see what other cities are offering up to the world, check out this post on L.A.’s site – it’s got a running total of them all.

In today’s increasingly global environment, Metroblogging Detroit is excited to be part of this worldwide team and we look forward to learning more about Austria’s second-largest city through the intimate, street-level view Metblog authors are known for.

You can find some background information on Graz here, but, if you’re interested in what it’s really like, there’s no better place to start than Metroblogging Graz.

Before I read Fuzzy’s post and read this NPR article from Saturday, I wasn’t familiar with the license plate-size tiles that have shown up in the asphalt of several US cities including Detroit and three South American cities, but I feel like I have a faint memory of coming across one while downtown and thinking, “What on Earth is that?” and then just dismissing it as street art.

Has anyone seen any Toynbee Tiles around town lately? Apparently they get paved over quite often.

Minimalistfan on Flickr has pictures of the Detroit tiles – uploaded and taken in May 2005, but he credits them to someone else.

From what I’ve learned at Wikipedia on the subject, there have been about 130 tiles in all; each has some variation of the following message, which most believe refers to historian Arnold J. Toynbee and filmmaker/director-Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odessey:

TOyNBEE IDEA
IN KUbricK’s 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPiTER.

Other tiles have a second message implying a conspiracy between John S. Knight of Knight-Ridder and the U.S. government.

Earlier today, the Royal Thai Army staged a coup d’etat against the government of Thailand’s Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin was attending a United Nations conference in New York at the time.

Metrobloggers in Bangkok have been covering the incident first-hand since it began and have reported that some of the accounts made by worldwide media outlets have been overblown or incorrect.

To find out what’s really going on and to keep up to date on Thailand’s first coup in 15 years, click here.