Jonelle Procope, the president and C.E.O. of the Apollo Theater Foundation, has not only given back to the community by raising $50 million to revamp the historic theater that helped launch legends like Billie Holiday and Michael Jackson. She continues to be on the lookout for emerging artists and talents by checking out KiptonART, a site run by patron of the arts Kipton Cronkite, nephew of former newscaster Walter. She also drops in daily to AOL Black Voices, Essence.com, and the online arts-and-crafts marketplace Etsy.

Washington’s most networked lawyer, Bob Barnett, a partner in Williams & Connolly, waits for the blogosphere to come to him. “I generally read the ones that are sent to me, like Michael Cader’s Publisher’s Lunch and Mediabistro,” he says, while ticking off a list of other political blogs he checks in on from time to time: Mike Allen and Ben Smith on Politico, Chuck Todd on MSNBC’s First Read, Rick Klein on ABC’s The Note, and The Page by Time’s Mark Halperin.

Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the nonprofit venture capital firm the Acumen Fund, is an active participant in the technology and business innovation community group called TED and she keeps up with its blog. She also visits NextBillion, which posts news and commentary on sustainable business models that address poverty, and reads the latest marketing insight from Acumen adviser and marketing guru Seth Godin on his eponymous blog.

As expected, tech mastermind Danny Hillis, who invented the search-engine technology that made Google possible and who is the co-founder of R&D problem-solving company Applied Minds, is keen on techie sites like BoingBoing and CoolTools. For information on meteor showers and the sun-earth environment, another of his interests, he goes to SpaceWeather.

But not everyone is so predictable. Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey, the duo that founded 23andMe, differ in their reads: While Wojcicki is catching up with industry news on  TechCrunch and BioTechNews, Avey is having more fun on the news, gossip, and opinion site Huffington Post and on Wired.

If you’ve ever wondered where the brilliant get their ideas (or kill a little time), consider some of the sites above.