Zivity, a new adult social network start-up, has raised a $1 million round of seed capital from Silicon Valley investors — as it prepares for launch.

It’s not a porn site, such as the newer sites Eroshare (pictures) or Pornotube (vidoes). Rather, it likens itself to a mixture of MySpace and Playboy magazine with popularity/voting features thrown in. It says it focuses on pinup-like photography, or so-called “fine art erotica.” It invites regular woman — such as the local Starbucks barista — to submit photo shots.

It is apparently based on ruby+rails, python, and/or perl, according to its job list.

Comscore data for July reveals that Bebo is now the number one visited social networking site in the UK, overtaking MySpace. Sitting in third place is Facebook. According to the statistics, Bebo registered a total of 10.7m unique users ahead of MySpace which has 10.1m and Facebook with 7.6m.

Bebo is also ranked as the second most engaging website in the UK with 8.7b page views - only just behind Google which received 8.8b.

However, I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction. Based on anecdotal evidence amongst my friends and colleagues here in London, give it six months or less, and Facebook’s UK figures could look very different. I suspect they’ll be a lot closer to the other two — within the thousands not millions — and could eventually overtake them both.

Mashable Launches the Web 2.0 Marketplace: Free for 48 Hours

This week we’re soft-launching something that I think fills a big need: a single place to buy, sell and trade modern websites, services and more. What’s more, everyone who lists within the next 48 hours gets a week’s free listing. It’s called, at least for now, the Web 2.0 Marketplace.

Increasingly, companies are listing themselves on eBay and other marketplaces, but telling us they got more leads from Mashable. Pligg, for example, told us about the sale before anyone else. Or folks are trying to sell their Facebook applications, provide development services for Facebook applications and MySpace widgets, looking for suitable job candidates, looking to advertise their events and so on. Clearly, there needs to be a single point for all this activity. So here are some of the things you can list on the Web 2.0 Marketplace:

Clipmarks, one of the many startups that helps users collect and organize information from around the web, is being bought by Forbes Magazine, an inside source tells us.

The New York-based startup lets you select text, photos or videos on web pages, then use Clipmark’s bookmarking feature to save the URL and your selected information to your Clipmarks folder. From there, you can share your “clips” with friends and colleagues and even search to find the most popular clips on the Clipmarks site.

Spock, the Redwood City, Calif. search engine for people, launches tomorrow after a year of suspense.

It has remained secretive for months (see our original coverage), testing its engine, adding some 100,000 profiles and inserting other social networking features. In those past stories, we showed examples of how profile pages of people contain all sorts of information about people.

We asked chief exec Jaideep Singh how he plans to make money. He said the company will serve ads next to searches just like Google does, though it will wait a few months before doing so.

If we said Google News has added comments, you’d probably say “finally”. In fact they are adding comments, but with a twist: the US version is letting people or organizations who are part of a news story add comments to it.

Here’s how it works: if you search for your company or name and find stories, you can send an email to news-comments@google.com. Include your comment and contact details, plus a way to verify that you’re from that company - owning the email address me@relevantcompany.com may be enough (you need to reply to a mail sent there, not just spoof it - see the help section for more info). If approved by Google, your comment will appear beneath the story like this.

A report out today by Glen Allsopp at Clickalite shows�the number of times that the Technorati Top 100�blogs that have been dugg�since Digg began.

Glen says, “The top 5 blogs make up 45% of the 8,000 times 79 blogs on the Technorati Top 100 Blogs have hit the Digg Homepage.“�

The top 5 are:

It’s well known�that Ars Technica is the most dugg, but I was surprised not to see Gizmodo in the top 5. Remember that Technorati ranks blogs by number of inbound links but these blogs are also some of the most visited as well, so it makes sense that they are the most Dugg. Most eyes = more diggs = more chance of a homepage digg.

But in practice this doesn’t work so well. Sellers are looking for a big base of buyers to sell into to leverage the network effect. eBay obviously does an excellent job of this. Otherwise there is no reason they would command a long term leadership position with their high fees. Buyers and sellers put up with the fees because it is the place to go to conduct p2p transactions. The network effect perpetuates their success and newcomers have a very difficult time gaining market share.

Closed networks work for some things, but they don’t seem to work for trading physical goods. My bet is that Garage Sale and Mosoma fall short of expectations, and that eBay is looking on with, at best, bemused interest.