Great Online Hangouts for Bloggers

When I was a kid, I hung out in the woods and baseball card stores. When I was a teenager it was the mall and the movie theater. Now? It’s bookstores like LifeWay, Borders, and Barnes & Noble. But online, I have some places I like to hang out as well. Call them time bandits if you wish, but I find them beneficial. These are some of my own favorite online hangouts. (Be prepared to share your own in the comments…)

Networks for Bloggers

Twitter – Twitter gets an include because when I asked the question via Twitter, “Hey bloggers, if you had 30 spare minutes to hang out somewhere online, where would it be?,” the answers were all either Twitter, or a Twitter-related app like Seesmic or TweetDeck. It’s essential, at least for now, for bloggers to be connected to Twitter. In fact, I’d say that if you’re not on Twitter, you may not exist (as a blog, not as a person). Oh, and you can follow me if you’d like.

Facebook – Again, another no-brainer, but what would my list be without it? Hanging out on Facebook is good for two reasons – connecting and sharing – same as Twitter.

Friendfeed – Yes, I know Facebook bought them and so sign-ups have slowed down, but it’s a place where you can see the aggregated content of plenty of fellow bloggers (such as me). And here’s another advantage – feed your blog’s rss feed to Friendfeed and all of your subscribers will count into your Feedburner total, assuming you use Feedburner.

News for Bloggers

Google Reader – I’ve always been terrible about remembering birthdays, which explains why I’m also terrible about remember to visit the blogs of my friends. Google Reader is a little bit like my blogging secretary, informing me of the special occasions and news in the lives of my friends.

I might add, when your Reader is empty, you can also jump over to Google’s blogsearch or Google news.

Alltop – It calls itself an online magazine rack, which is exactly how I think of it. About every major feed on every major subject is here for your browsing pleasure. It’s an inspiration zone for bloggers.

BlogEngage – I’ve recently discovered BlogEngage and am already an avid proponent of it as one of the nicer article submission sites around (and it’s much more than that too). It’s basically a place for bloggers to hang out together and help each other in various ways.

Tweetmeme – What’s being tweeted about? You can trust the ten little trending topics in your Twitter sidebar, but I like Tweetmeme much better. You can see what’s trending in virtually any area of the web by browsing its subjects.

Blogosphere – Blogosphere has been around a while, and seems to have lost some of its luster, but I still like the look of it and I like to see what’s popular among blogs.

Forums for Bloggers

I only hang out at three forums online. For others, forums are a major component of a blogging strategy. For me, they just take way too much time. But these are the three that I’ve found to be most personally valuable…

FreelanceSwitch Forums – It’s a forum for freelancers, but some of the best discussions go on there. I’m not as active here as I used to be, but I used to spend way too much time here.

Problogger.com Forums – Darren Rowse (Problogger.net) recently used this secondary domain to launch one of the best forums I’ve ever been a part of. One of the reasons I think it’s so good is that it costs $1.99 per month, which weeds out people who are just joining forums en masse for the link juice only.

Sitepoint Forums – Some of my earliest contacts in the design and consultation arena came from hanging out at Sitepoint’s forums. It’s huge, diverse, and it also happens to be dofollow, if you care about such things.

This is one of those posts that just cries out for your input. Where do you hang out? What networks / sites / forums / memes or whatever benefit you the most? (Yes, you can even plug your own.)

photo credit: Plutor