There are millions of websites on the Internet today, in fact there's about 162 million of them. Some are great and some are not. This post is about a very creative website I found called Thoughts.

Thoughts.com is so much more than your average website because of the massive community of real people that make up the site. Members can create blogs and online journals, upload and share their photos, videos, and podcasts to the website. The interactivity of this site doesn't stop there, but because there's so much going on at Thoughts.com I'll focus on their very well maintained community forum. If you're looking for a really outstanding set of forums to become a member of, continue reading as I'll lay out a few of my observations about the site while highlighting what really caught my attention.

An online community of bloggers from around the globe

By description, Thoughts.com is simply an online community of bloggers from around the globe. For starters I should note that the website has been online since 1995 which places it in an elite category among online sites.

At the time of this writing I noticed that there were over 2000 guests and 50 forum members browsing and commenting inside the forum. If you think 2000 guests are something you'll be surprised to know that the Thoughts forum now has over 50K registered members. Those thousands of members have now created almost 100K posts in 6500 threads. The most users online at once was 12,390 people which tells me that anyone creating forum posts at Thoughts has the opportunity to reach quite a few people

Despite the size of the community, the forum is very neatly designed without being too overcrowded unlike other online communities of this size. What I was impressed about was the main categories of this forum. There are 42 different sub-forums that make up the 9 main forum categories that members can either post in or just sit back and read from.

These main categories are as follows...

• About Thoughts.com
• Current News
• Entertainment
• Life Requests
• Lifestyles
• Math and Science
• Religion and Belief
• Politics
• Writing

The senior members of the forum are very dedicated when it comes to making Thoughts the best it can be. Spend a little bit of time reading their threads and you'll see that they're very interested in hearing any tips that members might have for making the online community even more of a positive experience. For example, because the site receives so many blog posts, they have this "Random Posts" section and when you click on the "Random Posts" link on the navigation menu, you'll be given a set of 25 random posts from the last 24 hours. The reason for this unique feature is to make the community more accessible to all readers and also to encourage participation in the forums and blogs.

You've heard of websites holding online contests for prizes and rewards, right? Well, monkey see, monkey do and Thoughts.com is no different until you find out what their contest is and what they give away to the lucky winners. They contest is known as the Thoughts.com Weekend Getaway Writing Contest and the winners of the last one received a three day and two night mini-vacation getaway for them and a guest.