From the Article:

What do you do when you’re a small online social network trying to compete against a behemoth like Facebook?

The answer may be to try to carve out a separate path by becoming a niche website for a specific audience base that advertisers, hopefully, want to target.

While this is no easy challenge — given Facebook’s intention to become everything to everyone — some small social media sites appear to be finding their footing and growing at rapid rates, albeit from a very low base.

Ning.com, which allows users to build their own social networks, opinion aggregator Sodahead and fansite Fanpop have shown triple-digit growth and notched up a few million users very quickly.

Source: Reuters

From the Article:

To make that online information more reliable, NIH [National Institutes of Health] is encouraging its scientists and science writers to edit and even initiate Wikipedia articles in their fields. This month, it joined with the Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes the cyber encyclopedia, to host “Wikipedia Academy,” a training session on the tools and rules of wiki culture, at NIH headquarters in Bethesda.

Over the course of a day, more than two dozen Wikipedia volunteers — just a few of the 4,000 people who edit English-language Wikipedia articles at least five times a month — gave presentations promoting the open-source encyclopedia and encouraging about 100 NIH employees to become editors.

Source: Washington Post