According to this article from the Mercury News, social networking, blogging, and local search sites on the Web are growing at a phenomenal pace. Here's a snippet:

"Top-ranked sites growing the most, comScore's data showed, were Blogger.com, a personal publishing site; MySpace.com, where young people do virtual preening and share musical tastes; Wikipedia, an open reference site jointly edited by millions of people; and Citysearch, a network of local guides focused on cities. The number of monthly visitors to each site rose at rates ranging from 185 percent (Citysearch) to 528 percent (Blogger.com) between February 2005 and February 2006. Their growth far exceeded the 4 percent increase in overall Internet visitors in the United States during that period."

Let's take a brief look at some of these.

MySpace is the behemoth in the world of social networking; I heard the other day that something close to 200,000 people sign up EVERY DAY at MySpace.

Blogger is a service that gives anyone who wants one a blog, so they can add their voice to the online conversation. So easy that my mom could do it.

Wikipedia is a free source of information about pretty much anything you can think of, that anyone can edit. There's been some ongoing issues with the credibility of the information that's found at Wikipedia, but overall it's a great service that I use quite frequently.

Citysearch is "a network of local guides focused on cities"; it's seen a lot of growth but it doesn't focus on smaller towns, only on large cities. If you're looking for a site that focusses on smaller towns, you might want to keep an eye on Backfence, so far based only in Virginia and Maryland but I see lots of potential here.

Related: Read my list of the best free premade MySpace layouts, learn how to add music to MySpace, find out how to put premade MySpace layouts in your MySpace profile, find blogs with blog search engines, or learn more about Yahoo Local Search, in my opinion one of the best local search sites out there right now.