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!

As expected, the two public viewing areas in Graz were crowded. What I didn’t expect was, that they wouldn’t let people in anymore, more than an hour before the game started. Since the Public viewing areas in Graz are commercial events, organized by newspapers and sponsors, they have blinds on the fences, which make it nearly impossible to view the game from the outside.

A few stood on trashcans and some even climed onto trees to get a clear view. The mood was great however. Too great to go watch the game at home with some friends, so I joined some hundred people, Austrians as well as Germans, sitting in front of a single TV, not far from the videowall we couldn’t see, but close enought to hear the outcry of thousands of people, when Michael Ballack shot the goal.

After a little over 90 minutes, the game ended, with lots of disappointed austrians heading into the city or back home. On the other hand, there were also some laughing germans, that celebrated the victory of their team.

And Graz will feature the first PolitCamp… this week!

PolitiCamp will be a great opportunity to talk about the political dimensions of new communication infrastructures and to meet influential Austrian minds.

Don’t forget to check it out!

Link

So we entered the chicken zone and as far as the competition goes, KFC seems to win:

The place was crowded like a japanese swimming pool. Seriously. I took that picture after 20 minutes and it took us another 20 minutes to finally get to the counter. That gave us enough time to think about the huge and tasty bucket we saw on the internet. 63 pieces of pure flesh wrapped in crispy coating. Nothing else but chicken.

The sad truth is, that, due to “whatever”, there are no huge bukkit. There were just 4 different types of buckets which included some flesh, a soft drink we didn’t need and some french fries we didn’t want. Disappointedly sad we ordered the “Variety Bucket” which suited our hunger the most. After the long discussion with our “waitress” about what the Variety Bucket contains (the usability of the overhead-display-menu isn’t really good) we finally got the nourishment to provide our hunger with pure satisfaction and let’s face it: he was pretty satisfied. The cost/performance ratio is comparable with KFCs fast food competitors but it isn’t worth the journy from Eggenberg.

Thus we keep waiting for Subway Sandwitch to arrive in Graz