This is hardly a new issue, but at a time when all the talk is about engaging users in advertising, why are Facebook - and countless other websites to be fair - still serving up such lame advertising?

Case in point, today Facebook is showing me the ad you see to your right, which, aside from the irony you can cut with a knife, is basically the same sales pitch that the Internet was offering a decade ago. On a large scale, I can see how this advertising works. Attractive people in ads, even if untargeted, generate clicks, and a small subset of those clicks generate sign-ups, purchases, email addresses, or whatever else the marketer on the other end is looking for.

But with so many opportunities – especially for sites like Facebook that have such an abundance of data about their users – to do more interesting things with ads, why are they still settling for this? In reality, it still probably makes sense for Facebook to be serving these ads. While they’re experimenting with new forms of advertising, like for Fan Pages, something needs to fill the billions of page views worth of inventory the social network is serving up, and for now, apparently deceptive dating ads remain the status quo. And until the new forms of advertising catch up with the old from a revenue perspective, we’ll likely be stuck with it.

However, both Facebook and Digg are giving us tools to move this process along. With Digg’s upcoming introduction of the ability to “Bury” ads, and Facebook’s existing thumbs up/down buttons, perhaps if enough of us start voicing our opinions with our mouse clicks, we can arrive sooner at the more engaging world of advertising where both users and advertisers ultimately want to be.