Facebook has quietly launched a keyword advertising system to rival Google's AdSense. Disguised as a simple upgrade to Flyers, its system for selling cheap ads on a self-service basis, the new system charges per click and lets advertisers target by city, gender, age, relationship status, employer, educational level, political views, and keywords. Facebook has the data, generated by its users and the new system will have "detailed reporting".

The Industry Standard, my former magazine, appears to be considering re-launching. Its six years since the death of the “newsmagazine of the Internet Economy”, but at least it left a good looking corpse. Many people still respect the kind of in-depth investigate coverage it brought to the Internet industry.

Quite why owners IDG are considering bringing it back is beyond me. Time-Warner pulled the plug on Business 2.0, a similar title, only last week.

A web-only format is more likely than a print magazine. And since blogs are now 'the thing', it would be odd not to incorporate those., We'll see....

On the weekend I went to the TV Unfestival, an "unconference" about TV, which is a sort of Fringe even to the Media Guardian TV Festival.

Although the event was typical of a tech/geek gathering in the unconference format - lots of healthy debate, discussion and networking - there was often a disparity between the 'open rights' and open source culture of the tech world and the locked-down, "copyrighted up to the eyeballs" culture of the TV world.

There was also not a great deal of talk about funding and where the money was going to come from to fund the brave new ventures online which TV firms will need to make to capture their audiences which are ebbing away. TV people are used to hearing about commissions, advertising, subscription models. They are not used to - or at least have yet to be convinced - that user generated content and 'video ad insertions' into online video clips will replace the millions in cash currently available to them in the traditional networked TV world. And to an extent, one can't blame them. Its a brave new world we are entering.

Talking to the very few (I suspect they are not into unconferences!) number of real TV producers and the "geeks" at the event I got an unexpected difference in opinion. The TV people often felt they were at the cutting edge of the new world. And although the atmosphere was overall positive, some "Geeks" meanwhile would express frustration to me that the over-riding culture of the tech world was going to have a very hard time communicating what they had to offer to traditional TV.

In other thoughts from the event.......

• We had a presentation from Sclipo.com, a user-generated 'skills sharing' site. Users can sell teaching videos ebay-like or revenue comes from ads. Along with the usual 'how to' video there is one quite impressive feature where users can pay for lessons from a teacher literally live streamed via webcam, and there is an in-built payment mechanism. What's the betting that's going to be used for nefarious purposes fairly shortly? Based in Barcelona, they are looking for staff so if you want a warmer climate and can do flash, php, Web2 style stuff then get on to them.

• A Joost guy (unnamed) told me that they thought building legally ratified stuff - as in not going the 'open rights/creative commons' route - is 'the way forward' because it means building on stuff which doesn't get taken down by the lawyers later on.

• The man with the most zeitgeisty name in the Web business "Paul Pod" demo'd a full-blown working site for Tioti which so far is still in closed Beta. They plan to have an API coming out in a month of so, which will show info on shows and TV characters. He also insisted TIOTI is not a 'recording service in disguise'.

Coverage of this year's Edinburgh TV Un-Festival 2007 and the Media Guardian International TV Festival will appear across both tbites.com and - where the topic is on digital media - mediabites.com. Stay tuned...

Brands buying advertising space inside virtual worlds are free to do so in the UK, since the Advertising Standards Authority state that only ads in the 'public realm' - for example, those placed on a virtual billboard - would fall within its remit. In other words there are basically no restrictions.

Adverts continue to appear beside far-right and racist groups on Facebook despite major advertisers pulling their campaigns following revelations that their brands were appearing alongside such groups.

First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, Halifax, AA, and Prudential have already pulled their ads after finding they were appearing next to the far-right BNP party, following a story broken by New Media Age this week.

But research by tbites has found that adverts continue to appear alongside groups associated with the BNP, including the groups BNP - People Just like you making a difference, Old-Fashioned Fascists and Vote BNP and Save The World.

In each case the advert in question is for Searchanything.co.uk, an affiliate advertising search engine run by Advertising.com International Ltd, the UK subsidiary of US-based Advertising.com Inc, one of the world's largest interactive advertising network. There is no suggestion that Advertising.com is aware that their adverts are appearing beside these groups. In all likelihood there is an automated script making these ads appear which Facebook appears not to have taken down.

A Comscore survey of global visitors age 15 and older highlights how Facebook has grown by 270% in the last year, which would put it on track to being larger than MySpace by the end of this year. In North America it has racked up 68.4% of the total unique visits to MySpace’s 62.1%. Facebook only opened its APIs on May 24th, 2007.

Comscore said social networking behemoth MySpace.com attracted more than 114 million global visitors age 15 and older in June 2007, representing a 72-percent increase versus year ago. Facebook.com experienced even stronger growth during that same time frame, jumping 270 percent to 52.2 million visitors. Bebo.com (up 172 percent to 18.2 million visitors) and Tagged.com (up 774 percent to 13.2 million visitors) also increased by orders of magnitude.

Bebo.com has a particularly strong grasp on Europe, attracting nearly 63 percent of its visitors from that region, while Orkut is firmly entrenched in Latin America (49 percent) and Asia-Pacific (43 percent). Friendster also attracts a significant proportion of its visitors (89 percent) from the Asia-Pacific region.

“A fundamental aspect of the success of social networking sites is cultural relevance,” said said Bob Ivins, executive vice president of international markets. “Those doing well in certain regions are likely doing an effective job of communicating appropriately with those regions’ specific populations.

Since February, Facebook has doubled its ad rates for sponsored groups from $150,000 to $300,000 in the US, reports ValleyWag which has obtained Facebook's PowerPoint rate-card deck. Facebook now says it's the top photo site. The minimum sponsorship remains $50,000, and Facebook claims the click-through rate is 20 times that of banners. This higher fee means the number of homepage links and sponsored stories advertisers get also doubles.

UK mobile network Three has signed Aardman Animations, creators of the Wallace and Gromit series of animations, to supply video "snack" content. Has the Aardman’s ‘Angry Kid’ series of video shorts which are paid downloads, but this new package is ad-supported, and will feature old favourites such as Creature Comforts, A Town Called Panic, Purple & Brown and Morph. 3's ad-supported video service is operated by Rhythm NewMedia.

"Launching an ad-supported service is the next step in a strategy, which will continue Aardman's leadership in mobile animation services," said Robin Gladman, digital product manager at Aardman Animations.

Newser is a news search engine finessed by human editors. The site has been launched by Patrick Spain, the CEO of Highbeam (cofounder and former CEO of Hoover’s) and journalist Michael Wolff. The mission of the site: “quickly learn more about the most important and most talked about news stories each day, as well as to dig a bit deeper on news topics that interest you.” This is not unlike other sites like Newsvine, Digg, Netscape etc. Editors summarise breaking stories.

Newser looks nice but it is like shoe-horning a portal play onto a web which is increasingly focused on niche and application/function, not on telling me which story is “big” right now. The point is, I already know that. I don’t see this working…