That's right. Gravel. It's my new name. I think it suits me.

You know, Gravel. As in Gravel Palin. Or more specifically, Gravel Blood Palin. 

Are you jealous that I have a Palin name and you don't? Well, do not let envy eat you up from within ... that's, like, way unpatriotic. Instead, do what I did and check out the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator to get your very one Palin moniker. Although I guarantee you that you won't get as awesome a Palin name as Gravel Blood. (A friend of mine was dubbed Hen Waffle Palin, which, to be sure, is rad. But there just isn't something right about having the name "Waffle" in an election season. It's worse than Hussein! Also, isn't Hen just a little, I don't know ... sexist? Maybe I'm reading too much into this?)

What's your Palin name?

Mark Zuckerberg, listen up! Ad Age's Bob Garfield (co-host of NPR's On the Media--whom I've interviewed and whose bitingly dry wit I lurve) is the latest and perhaps greatest to offer up a business model. Monetizing Facebook, what a novel concept. He begins his piece, "Your Data With Destiny," with a little context for you, young padwan:

The quid pro quo between the marketer and the audience, for several centuries, has been free or subsidized media in exchange for inundation with ad messages. Madge didn't say "You're soaking in it" for nothing. In the Brave New World, and already in the last remnants of the cowardly old one, the value proposition will be similar but the barter items very different. A marketer needn't pay for episodes of "Gunsmoke" or "Married With Children" or "24"; it need only provide value -- whether in entertainment, information, discount or utility. In exchange, the consumer surrenders data.

Nothing too surprising there. Gradually he winds his way through his argument, taking you in the process to MIT, Silicon Valley, even Israel. Here's a little nugget of wisdom he picks up in Dulles:

"'Now we have the ability to automate serendipity,' says Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda, the behavioral-marketing firm sold to AOL in 2007 for a reported $275 million. 'Consumers may know things they think they want, but they don't know for sure what they might want. They're not spending all their time hunting for those things.'"

"Automating serendipity" is a concise and almost lovely way of putting it -- if you find sophisticated Orwellian marketing schemes to be lovely. But hey, if you play online, you probably know that you're leaving behind breadcrumbs for advertisers. You may have noticed those ads on Google or eBay or even, yes, Facebook pages that already seem eerily tailored to your interests. You have only yourself (and your web surfing habits) to blame/thank. Don't like it? Log off. After about eleventy thousand words, Garfield gets to his advice to Zuckerberg. People who have even passively paid attention to developments in online advertising aren't going to find any of this particularly earth-shattering or revolutionary. But the fact that Zuckerberg hasn't adopted a common sense approach like Garfield's (yet, anyway) is nonetheless surprising:

Dude, blessed as you are with the megaphenomenon called Facebook, why are you just another popular utility in search of a business model? Could it be that you're fixated on the notion that your revenue must come from typical advertising? Haven't we agreed that advertising is problematic, because users are suspicious of it, resent it and employ every means to avoid it? Yes, we have. Yet the same people 1) love goods and services; 2) crave information; and 3) are so fabulously self-involved that they display every last detail about themselves, their tastes, their preferences, their favorites, their hobbies, their embarrassing drunken photos, their damn near everything right on your site.

So why in the world do you not have a big honking box on the bottom of every Facebook page titled "What You'll Like" or "YouStuff" or "The Mirror" with a category-by-category selection of books, music, films, videos, news articles, websites, tennis gear, shoes, power tools, specialty foods, flea and tick protection, you name it?

So what do you think? How would you monetize Facebook?