What a curious site. iContact Community merges blogs, forums, and voting into a single site. There are two main kinds of users:

1) Publishers
2) Members

It appears being a member is free. The idea is that you can browse through the publisher's blog posts--which are pretty much advertisements. Publishers pay a fee to blog and send newsletters to a mailing list that they create through the site.

Publishers can:

• Create a list
• Add a contact
• Create a message
• Create a campaign
• Create a blog

The publishers are broken up into:

• Arts
• Automotive
• Business
• Education
• Entertainment
• Events
• Government
• Health
• Hobbies
• Non-Profit
• Pets
• Politics
• Real Estate
• Religion
• Shopping
• Sports
• Technology
• Women

The voting is a little less intuitive than other voting systems. For example, I clicked on this post called Grace Notes 11-5-07: "Servant or Celebrity?" / Thanksgiving Sermons. Why? It was the first in a list. I decided to click on the "vote" button thinking that it would allow me to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down rather like other sites that include voting. I quickly realised that my "vote" was counted just by clicking on the link with no way to take back the vote. I'm now registered as approving of a rather right leaning religious post distributing prepackaged sermons for lazy pastors and hawking intolerance of Islam. Please let me take my vote back!

The site has a search engine. Typing "theatre" into the engine quite a few hits. Unfortunately clicking "This Month" to filter the results displayed posts from 5 months ago and older. I clicked on the first post in the list, AGLET THEATRE AUDITIONS and was greeted with a blank page.

The site is a little buggy and the results aren't as clear as one might like. You encounter blank pages and the filters don't work quite right. If you click on a vote icon by accident you are locked in. It seems pretty commercial in its content as well. Still the concept is interesting but is predicated on members coming to the site and signing up for newsletters and reading blogs. It is in beta, so on the bug front, I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt.