Ann Arbor is practically stuffin up the tubes. My search yesterday for a local source of catfish led me to all sorts of more or less interesting and useful www resources about our fair and midwestern town.

ArborWiki.org is a wiki for Ann Arbor. Given my heavy crush on DavisWiki you’d think I’d be utterly in love with a wiki for a town I’m actually in. It looks good, and clearly has fleshed out a lot since I first perused it this time last year when I was thinking about coming here. But it doesn’t have the same crazy info-heat as the Davis equivalent. I think a big difference is the lack of a map. Maps are very compelling ways to browse localized information, and I imagine the added cool factor also encourages potential writers. Maybe one could be added to ArborWiki. Anyhow, there is some good stuff on there. For instance, I learned about the history of the abandoned Y which is on my daily walk to school, some details about Monahan’s (who I now heartily recommend for all your Ann Arbor seafish needs, even if they didn’t have catfish while I was there) and some political gossip about the building kitty-corner from my house.

Arbor Update is a sort of collective news blog about local politics, and had the specific details about the WUOM gossip. Looks to be run by a bunch of U Mich grad types. They claim “the true value of the site is not in the posts themselves but in the discussion”. Seems like a decent place to get your politicized news of the town.

The Beer Depot website is the internet home of my favourite place to grab a sixer and a fifth of something and maybe some organic cigarettes. The web site features the blinking graphic “drive thru service | not recommended”. A reference to the fact that they just don’t have it anymore. But who can blame them for keeping the lovely neon “drive thru” sign, or incorporating it into their web presence.

The Communicator is another source of politicized local news, in this case in the form of a highschool-student run newspaper. If that strikes you as odd consider

ArborSpeech, essentially a free web host for any local group, regardless of political stripes, also student run by the same Community High School. If that also strikes you as odd, have a look at this mind blowing wikipedia entry on the high school in question, which points out among other things that “the school’s only formal rules would be two safety precautions: ‘no smoking except in the student-teacher lounge and persons must wear shoes’ – although even these were quickly abandoned”. Man, am I glad I didn’t go to that highschool. If experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want, I would have emerged a highly inexperienced young man.

Left Behind at the Fishbowl appears to be a blog devoted to making fun of printed material orphaned in the printer hoppers of the giant computer lab known as the fishbowl. Remind me not to do that.

And finally, Ann Arbor is Overrated is the snarky and generally pretty funny Ann Arbor blog that you already knew about.