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."

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:

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.

This piece looking at results from YouTube's rental experiment illustrates the short-sighted thinking that handcuffs content companies:

Ouch! We're talking about 1,422 total views, or $5,673.78 for all of the rentals at $3.99 apiece. If Google is giving the filmmakers roughly two-thirds of the take -- and I'm going by other digital-media standards, since the site isn't publicly spelling out the royalty payouts -- each of the five productions will walk away with just hundreds of dollars for their role as video-sharing pioneers over the weekend.

I put this paragraph in the "trading analog dollars for digital pennies" genre. It's catchy. Reasonable on first glance. But when you dig deeper, it's ultimately ridiculous.

That $5,673.78 figure isn't the key. The big deal -- and the hope -- lies in the 1,422 views. That's 1,422 chances for filmmakers to have their work seen. That's 1,422 more chances than they had before. The value of those views lies not in financial rewards (although that would be nice), but as a counter to an artist's great enemy: obscurity. Isn't that why film festivals exist? To show off work? To create the possibility of engagement? To create the possibility of landing theatrical distribution? How is YouTube's effort any different?

Here's the broader problem with this type of bottom-line analysis: digital income will almost always be lower than traditional income because digital audiences are smaller and empowered. They don't have to blindly accept what's given to them. They can pick and choose. They can sample. That's a powerful set of tools. It means control rests solely in consumers' hands.

Consumer control is the essential truth of digital content. Until that's acknowledged -- and until businesses are built to work in conjunction with this truth -- content companies will spin their wheels, lose money, and whine incessantly.

A phenomenal post from Jason Fry at the National Sports Journalism Center:

When I started Faith and Fear in Flushing with my friend Greg Prince in the winter of 2005, I'd been at The Wall Street Journal Online for nearly 10 years. But despite all that time as a Web guy, I'd adopted some rather unhealthy attitudes. I was studiously uninterested in knowing how many readers read my columns, and only took a passing interest in their reactions to them. I thought that my job was to be a thinker and a writer. Worrying about traffic numbers? That was somebody else's job - and a lesser calling.

This was arrogant and dumb, and a few weeks of writing Faith and Fear showed me that. On my own blog, the numbers were of immense interest to me. I pored over them every day in an effort to figure out what posts were connecting with readers and what posts weren't. I was singing for my supper, and it made me a better columnist. If a column was well written but didn't seem to connect, I wasn't happy with it. I no longer dismissed Web traffic as not my job, complained about writing promos for my stuff, or gave reader comments and emails short shrift. And I realized those folks on the business side were critical to our collective success, and could teach me things. [Emphasis added.]

I'll add this: journalism's biggest mistake was allowing business apathy/hatred among the editorial ranks. That's a far more egregious "sin" than publishing free Web content.