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!

Hopefully it doesn’t make my butt look too big.

As with any make-over, this one will come with a breaking in period where we learn how to put on mascara just like the pros do, and while we work out some kinks (like, oh say, your RSS feeds being dead?).  Kindly bear with us as we make some minor adjustments here and there, and please…look around. Stay a while. We’re happy – as always – to have you.  Most of you, anyway.

If you don’t have a sweetheart, significant other or spouse, well, you can always have the return of winter to the ATL. Yesterday was gorgeous, but St. Valentine’s Day has us all shivering sans anticipation.

So snuggle up next to your keyboard and leave a comment on how you’ll be spending this questionably romantic day in our fair city.

Me? I’m going with my wife to her ultrasound appointment to find out the sex of our second child.

Found an article on TechCrunch just now that a new site called Citizenbay is being launched.

Citizenbay is a city centered citizen journalism project that will pay users whose contributions are voted the ten best by readers each day in 60 cities around the US and France.

Hmmm. Sounds familiar. Come to think of it, not only is that the idea of this site, it’s half our tagline.

I dig the idea of voting on posts, but I’m still not subscribing to the adage on this one.

I’m not a fan of having to visit a site several times a day, rolling for the post I commented on at 7am to find out what the responses were. I’m a fan of having responses to comments delivered to my mailbox ala Comment Subscription Manager…but I digress.

If you’re like me and you want to subscribe to comments on Atlanta.Metblogs, word on the street is you can utilize the handy-dandy xml dealie bob.

I admit I haven’t tried it yet, but I will, and I’m curious to hear read if any of you are already employing this feature.

Please welcome Rio de Janeiro to the Metroblogging family. The first South American metroblog, looks to be exciting and interesting. Go pay a visit. Especially if you can read Portuguese (or try psuedo-translations to English here)

So if you’d like to join the Metroblog and write actively about what you like and what annoys you in Atlanta, apply here!

Welcome Hyderabad!