I enjoy reading blogs. You get to read stuff written by people with powerful voices.
I also like the aggregators like Reddit to get quick snapshots of lots of interesting things that the normal news sites might miss. The comments are fun, too.
I was visiting Cool Running today. Whenever I get back into running, this is the first place I go. In addition to a very nice online running log and some of my favorite beginner to intermediate training programs, they also have discussion forums.
I was reading through the archive to see if anything interesting happened since I visited way too many months ago. I found this old post from 9/11/2001. Real people. Real emotions. Real conversation.
No matter how much people like to say that they log to blog for the community and conversations, there is nothing that can match a good forum where most of the people know each other. It turns into real conversations like you would have in your living room or local coffee shop.