As a kid, I used to live for new editions of Beckett Baseball Card Monthly. Apparently, I wasn't alone:

American boys growing up in the 1980s approached Beckett Baseball Card Monthly with something like religious reverence. For many of us, it was the first magazine we bought and the only one we leafed through regularly. The magazine's circulation eventually reached about 1 million, with many of those issues no doubt destined for the book bags of young boys. We walked the school hallways in the '80s with our Becketts sandwiched between our textbooks, and we followed the price fluctuations of our favorite players with slavish devotion. Beckett's valuations served as the foundation for all card trades.

And just so everyone realizes how serious/geeky I was about baseball cards: I worked at The Baseball Shop in Orleans, Ma. through most of high school. I loved this stuff.

The magazine industry might want to consult the following video the next time they're fighting for consumers' hearts and minds.

Be sure to watch the whole thing. It's not what it initially appears to be. And you might want to gird yourself for the inevitable torrent of copycats to come.

Here's an interesting piece from the New York Times that looks at Facebook Connect's growing role as a sign-on / social graph utility. Twitter and Google have similar products. Why is this important? This excerpt sums it up:

Since Facebook Connect was introduced in December 2008, more than 80,000 Web sites and services have put the log-in feature to use, said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook developer network ... "Facebook is evolving through Facebook Connect into much more than a Web site," said Mr. Beard, who works closely with Facebook's community of third-party developers. "It's also a technology and a service to provide social plumbing and creating a social layer the whole Web can leverage." [Emphasis added.]

These sign-on services, along with other APIs, attempt to achieve lock-in through ubiquity. That's infinitely fascinating to me. Take Twitter, for example. It's become the standard for micromessaging (or microblogging or whatever you want to call it) not by forcing people into a Twitter.com silo, but by allowing the Twitter service to seep into the web's nooks and crannies. Put another way: "platform" is way more powerful than "website."

I did something amazing today.

I held out for nearly four hours before pre-ordering an iPad. Seriously. That's a huge deal for me. I mean, I own the Apple Airport Extreme, okay? I've got an Apple TV and a Mac Mini. My Apple fanboyism teeters on psychosis.

To reward me for my loyalty (and my recent herculean effort and inevitable cave-in), Apple continues to release details on the iPad that have nipped any lingering buyer's remorse in the bud. For example, there's this info delight that comes courtesy Wired's Gadget Lab:

And for EPUB titles that are not offered through the iBooks store, you can manually add them to iTunes and then sync them to the iPad ... That's good news for iPad customers, because that means bookworms won't be limited to the offerings in the iBooks store, which are based on partnerships that Apple inked with publishers.

This is a genius move on two fronts:

1. It makes the iPad semi-open. If you've already got EPUB files hanging around, you can port them to the iPad. And if you buy future EPUB-based books from smart publishers that support the format (ahem), you should be able to sync those titles with the device as well. The original iPod took off because it automatically worked with the pre-existing MP3 collections people had built up. Now, there aren't that many people out there with EPUB stockpiles. I realize that. But if you do have those files, or you want to buy material outside the iBookstore down the road, you can read all that stuff on the iPad. Well played, Apple.

2. It puts Amazon in a bind because the Kindle doesn't support EPUB by default. Now that the iPad does support the format natively, that makes the Kindle even more restrictive. Think about that. Apple -- the poster child for a totalitarian product ecosystem -- is making Amazon look like the bad guy.

I'm sure I'll have plenty more to say about the iPad in coming days. Lord knows I can't stop tweeting about it. But for now, I'll revel in the anticipated joy the weekend of April 3-4 will bring: iPad on 4/3 and Red Sox opening night on 4/4.

It's rare when you see such a clear example of the Internet's disruption: OK Go, the band best known for its clever music videos, has severed ties with its record label, EMI. The reason? The label is caught in old-think and wants to disable the embed function on the group's web-based videos.

OK Go ... God bless 'em ... told EMI to politely bugger off. The band knows embedding is an absolute must-have if you want to harness the web's power.

Speaking of which, here's the group's latest masterpiece:

I've seen lots of hand-wringing and sweaty prognosticating about Google. What will it do? What does it want? Is that don't be evil mantra for real?

Funny thing is, Google's strategy has always been in plain sight. There's no obfuscation. There's no misdirection. Heck, this New York Times piece spells it out:

Google has used a similar approach -- immense computing power, heaps of data and statistics -- to tackle other complex problems. In 2007, for example, it began offering 800-GOOG-411, a free directory assistance service that interprets spoken requests. It allowed Google to collect the voices of millions of people so it could get better at recognizing spoken English. A year later, Google released a search-by-voice system that was as good as those that took other companies years to build.

See what Google did there? It released a free service so it could gather huge amounts of data that could then be used in another product. That's what Google does. Free leads to data, data leads to another product. Repeat over and over and over and over again.

"This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again. Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come."

Gets me every time. Oh how I do love this game.