Community recommendations are becoming all the rage these days. While, Twitter and FriendFeed are popular ways to get recommendations within your personal networks and within a community, they don’t specifically cater to finding the most popular content within. Here are four great sites that give great recommendations of popular content within your own personal community and more!

BlogRize

BlogRize organizes communities around sites instead of the usual organization method based on friends. Unfortunately, because BlogRize is in “beta”, a site must reach a certain amount of members before it can become an open community. There are currently 4 site communities that are open: Louis Gray, Read/Write Web, Techcrunch, and Lifehacker. However, you can add your list of sites that you’d like to see a community built around and pray that others like it just as much as you do.

Within each community’s page, you’ll see popular shared items by other fans of the site and what the ratings for each article are. BlogRize sports a rather unique ratings system that users will benefit from. You’re not rating on a scale of 1-5. Instead, you rate whether an article is interesting, funny, insightful, lame, disagree, or facts wrong. You may find this more helpful then the lame 1-5 stars.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these BlogRize Reviews: BlogRize Builds A Community Around Your Blog and its Readers, BlogRize: Social News Gets Personal

LinkRiver

Last month, I called LinkRiver my personal Techmeme (Corvida on LinkRiver). I still stand by that statement.

LinkRiver goes the by the standards by allowing you to see what’s popular amongst those that you are following based on how many people have shared an item through their Google Reader linkblog and also the LinkRiver bookmarklet. However, it does an even better job of showing what’s popular amongst the entire LinkRiver community! On the LinkRiver Popular page, you’ll find more than enough popular content to get you through the week.

For more in-depth coverage, check out my LinkRiver review “LinkRiver Is My Personal Techmeme“.

Social Median

A new comer to content recommendation, Social Median gives you the hottest content from all across the tech community. Recommendations are based on the number of “clip its” an item has received. You can “clip” an item using Social Median’s “Clip it” bookmarklet.

There are various popular networks you can join to get better news recommendations sent to you. Also, if you don’t have time to check into the service, you can have Social Median email you the most popular content of the day or at a particular time.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these articles on Social Median: Former Jobster CEO’s Social|Median Incubating in Alpha, Social|median: Personalized News Filter – 1000 Invites

Blern

Blern is another new comer to the content recommendation niche. The difference between Blern and the others services is that Blern attempts to learn your reading habits in order to better serve you, instead of basing recommendations entirely off of the community like the others.

You can help Blern learn your reading habits by importing your feeds from services such as StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc, and by visiting your recommendations page often to give feedback on recommended content.

When you run out of content, Blern also features buzzword and feeds pages so that you can get the latest items from your feeds and also find popular content from buzzwords of your choice.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these articles on Blern: Blern Makes A Mistake From The Early Nineties, Blern.com – Blogs and Articles Recommended to You

The Power Of “You” And “Community”

In this day and age, finding content really is a simple as putting in a keyword on Google. With plenty of filters going around, nothing seems to be the filtering effects of yourself and a great community. All of these services can help to filter and provide you with better content, better sites, and even better people.