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.

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.

Tablets and devices will get all the coverage, but I believe ebook pricing is going to be 2010's biggest issue for publishers.

To illustrate ... this New York Times piece explains how Apple's $12.99-$14.99 range represents the outer limit for iBooks pricing. Those price points aren't set in stone. From the Times:

... Apple inserted provisions requiring publishers to discount e-book prices on best sellers -- so that $12.99-to-$14.99 range was merely a ceiling; prices for some titles could be lower, even as low as Amazon's $9.99. Essentially, Apple wants the flexibility to offer lower prices for the hottest books, those on one of the New York Times best-seller lists, which are heavily discounted in bookstores and on rival retail sites. So, for example, a book that started at $14.99 would drop to $12.99 or less once it hit the best-seller lists.

Sounds like Apple and Amazon are closer than we initially thought, right?

Nope. Not at all.

The single most important sentence in that Times article is buried at the very end:

Under the agreements with Apple, both the publishers and Apple should make money on each book sale. [Emphasis added.]

Ahh, there we go! Whether the price is $14.99, $12.99, $9.99 or $1.99, Apple will take its 30 percent. Set the price lower and sell more books? You betcha! Jack the price up and sell fewer? Absolutely!

What Apple won't do is subsidize a price point.

From The New York Times:

The average iPhone or iPod Touch owner uses 5 to 10 apps regularly, according to Flurry, a research firm that studies mobile trends. This despite the surfeit of available apps: some 140,000 and counting.

I've seen the same stat mentioned before. Heck, I referenced that stat in a piece I wrote. But what I find surprising is that anyone is surprised by this. It's the behavioral equivalent of the Long Tail: a few apps get frequent use -- the blockbusters -- while the others wane after post-installation popularity or, even worse, don't get downloaded at all.

Instead of this broad-based stuff, what I'd really like to see is data that links up people's interests/professions with their most-used apps.