And if along comes Saturday and you want to peruse the conversphere – walk the stacks over at Alltop  or feast upon the eye-pleasing Pinterest and decorate your own board. Blogging Brain Stew Online Communities Social network ThanksgivingBig weekend coming up. Football. Shopping. Family. And more of the same. Along about Saturday afternoon, a lot of folks turn their attention elsewhere – and it’s a perfect time to lay out some goodies for your readers and new visitors. Don’t forget the weekends , especially the long ones. Thanksgiving Gratitude. MORE >>

mix of social bookmarking and community, Blog Engage is similar to Digg and BizSugar with its voting system, but it focuses a lot on just bloggers and is a great starting point for ideas. One of my favourite blog communities is Scribnia. Alltop offers a great collection of blogs in a veritable feast of topics – if you can’t find something to write about there, then I’m stuck! Much like Alltop and Technorati, use the topic search to find your interests. This post originally appeared over at our blog resource centre, For Bloggers By Bloggers. MORE >>

CIThread – helps editors intelligently Curate for Communities. OneSpot – Tools for publishers aggregates RSS, Twitter, community ranking. Alltop – Limited blog aggregation. Great picture and post on the Information Overload Paradox : The post talks about the issue of overload: I can certainly consume more content than I could two decades ago, but no matter how much content is available, I can’t consume much more. And relative to the sheer volume of content available to me, I’m actually consuming a smaller percentage every day. Aggregation. Filtering. Curation. Images? MORE >>

Community-minded? Try Alltop. Use your blog comments – your readers are the greatest source of inspiration in your own community. This will help you grow the community and together you can reach the plateau that’s currently Above you. While these six directions are tailored toward the social media community user, there’s no reason why you can’t transfer them to your offline community as well. ?. Ancient philosophers believed life could be broken down into six different directions: Above, or Heaven – this reflects your dreams and hopes. Above. Below. MORE >>

These services show what is popular or new amongst their respective communities. Community Curated. Similar to Social Filter services, only these have a specific community driving the output of stories. Alltop. Tracking topics on the Web can be a painful process, due to the amount of noise and difficulty of filtering it. So to help you out, we've selected and categorized the leading topic tracking tools. This is based on the discussion that arose from our earlier post about topic feeds , which are RSS feeds for keywords or phrases. Sponsor. Google Alerts. PubSub. MORE >>