Seek and Ye Shall Find: FFFFOUND.com

Images from around the Web appear on FFFFOUND!, thanks to a community of artists and art lovers who post their favorite findings to the site. After just a few minutes on the site, I encountered origami ingeniously fashioned from dollar bills, a vintage Volvo ad, and some good-enough-to-eat interior design off ApartmentTherapy.com. Like StumbleUpon, FFFFOUND! keeps subtle track of your preferences—the more you click on images and links you like, the better your chances of turning up something as delightful, weird, and inspiring as Pablo Reinoso’s "Spaghetti Bench," a park bench with a noodle-y twist. (Google it!)

They're Reading Your Mind: Goodreads.com and LibraryThing.com

Good Reads and LibraryThing help to facilitate chance encounters with great books and authors. Create an account to share and rate what you're reading, and get recommendations from pals, acquaintances, colleagues, even perfect strangers—as on Facebook, your circle of fellow readers can be as exclusive or more-the-merrier as you like. On Goodreads right now, I'm seeing that one good friend has given five stars to Hannah Berry's Britten and Brulightly and another has bestowed the five-star honor on Frederick Seidel's poetry collection, Ooga-Booga. I'm not familiar with either title (I'm not even sure I can pronounce them), and I doubt they would have come up in conversation—yet now they're both on my must-read list.

Virtual Street Corners: Demos.org and AmericaSpeaks.org

In his book Republic.com 2.0, legal scholar Cass Sunstein writes that "chance encounters, involving shared experiences with diverse others..." are fundamental to a healthy democracy. What a thriving republic needs, Sunstein writes, are more venues for news and analysis that function as "street corners," where people can come across subjects and views that don't necessarily match up exactly with their interests or political affiliations. For inclusive, democratic approaches to civic issues, check out Demos and AmericaSpeaks where you can read about topics ranging from gender equality to tax credits for college students to the latest innovations in nonprofit outreach and community organizing.