Update: the Apple Store is back up, and yes, you can now pre-order the iPad. We haven’t seen any other significant changes in the Store.

It’s finally here; the moment where the iPad actually comes into some sort of contact with the market. As we announced before, iPad pre-orders begin at 5:30 AM PT (in about 1:30 hours), and the Apple Store is currently down, indicating that pre-order forms will be available when it comes back up (and possibly something more – you never know.)

Of course, users won’t actually be able to fondle the device until April 3rd, but (besides giving fans and enthusiasts a chance to be one of the first people to own an iPad), this moment is exciting because from now on, Apple (and, hopefully, the media) will have some idea how well this thing actually sells.

Although the iPad has created an enormous hype, one mustn’t forget that the jury is still out on whether it’ll be a huge success or a complete flop. It’s not only a new device, it’s a new type of device, and we’re eager to see what kind of ripples it’ll do to the IT market.

Tags: apple, ipad

What do you do when you first fire up your browser? Most probably, you log into various sites that require a username and password – Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and the like. For me, personally, it’s quite a chore, as I need to log into over 10 different services before I start doing anything.

Now, Mozilla sets out to alleviate this issue with a new Firefox plugin called Account Manager. It currently doesn’t do much; it recognized that you’ve signed in into a website and displays an icon that says that yes, you’re indeed signed up under that username. However, Mozilla has ambitious plans for online identity management from within a browser. From their blog post:

“Your Web browser, as your most trusted relationship in your life online, has nearly perfect knowledge of everything you do on the Web. We envision a world where your browser will play an even more active and critical role in helping you control and shape your online experience. To realize this vision, we need to increase the browser’s understanding of your online identity and provide a platform for building new capabilities that securely take advantage of this rich, dynamic set of data that represents the digital “you.””

The account manager is available as an early, experimental alpha version, and it works only with Yahoo!, Facebook and Google, as well as some of Mozilla’s sites that require login, such as Bugzilla. Hopefully, in the future we’ll see features that really make switching between different user accounts and sharing content on various social networks easier and more streamlined.

Tags: account manager, facebook, Firefox, Google, mozilla

One of the series of posts that we’re building here at ProBlogger is all about what to do in the first week of your new blog. We’re assuming you’ve already got your domain, chosen your blog platform and have installed a template/theme/design – but what comes next?

So far we’ve covered:

• Writing Your First Compelling Content
• Planning Future Content

Today we’re going to look at some of the key pages on your blog that can be worth setting up.

When a new person arrives on your blog there are a variety of types of pages that they may look for that will help them to decide whether they want to remain connected with you (or that will help them to actually make that connection).

Many blogs come with some of these set up by default but you’ll want to personalise these defaults as much as possible and possibly create some new pages of your own. These might include:

• About Page – setting up an about page is really important – it’s one of those pages that a new reader will head to in order to help them work out what your blog is about, who is behind it and to decide whether they’ll keep reading it. Read more on how to do it at Add an ‘About’ Page to Your Blog and How to Write Your “About Me” Page.
• Contact Page – some bloggers get a little nervous about being contactable either out of a fear of being overwhelmed by emails or over privacy concerns. While I get this – there are many benefits from being contactable (it opens up opportunities to be contacted by potential partners, advertisers, other bloggers, the press and readers) and there are ways of safeguarding your privacy. If you use WordPress there are numerous contact page plugins that will help you to set up a page that will safeguard your privacy.
• Subscribe Page – most blog templates have subscription buttons and links built in by default – however not all of your readers will be familiar with what they mean or how to use them. While most of us as bloggers understand what that orange RSS symbol means – many will not. Over at my Digital Photography site where I have readers of all levels of tech savyness I have a subscription page which outlines the different subscription options that we offer. This page is visited a lot and converts very very well both with RSS and Email Subscription methods (note: later in this series we’re going to explore the idea of ’subscription options’ to help you think through how to let readers connect with your blog).
• Other Pages – there are a variety of other types of key pages that you might want to consider setting up, depending upon the goals of your site. These might include a ‘Advertise with Us‘ page, ‘Press‘ page, ‘Disclaimer‘ page, ‘FAQ‘ page, ‘Resources‘ page (if you’re selling something for example), a ‘Privacy Policy’ page, ‘Testimonial‘ page (if you have some good ones from previous customers), a 404 page, a ‘Resources’ page, an Archives page etc. Not all of these would be relevant for new blogs but for more information on these and others – I’ve previously outlined 20 types of pages that bloggers should consider.

What pages have you got set up on your blog?

Once you’ve set up the pages that are important for your blog it is also important to think carefully about where you’ll link to these pages on your blog. Having the pages is one thing but you’ll also want to think about how you’ll be driving traffic to them.

This will depend upon your blog’s design but as with anything – make sure that the pages that are most important to you (for example an ‘About Page’ or a ‘Contact Page’ might be included in this category) ‘are linked to prominently on your blog. This might mean setting up a navigation area across the top of your blog or having one at the top of your sidebar.

Other less important pages might be linked to from your About Page or even in your footer (in this case I’d be putting things like disclaimer pages).

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

The First Week of Your Blog: Set Up Key Pages

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If you run an ecommerce business, chances are your customers – regardless of their age, gender or economic status – are active on social networks and social media sharing sites.

Just consider the statistics from social media monitoring site Pingdom:

• Males and females almost equally use social sites (47% vs. 53%)
• 61% of Facebook users are middle aged or older, with the average age being 37
• 18- to 24-year-olds don’t dominate any particular social networking site; they’re spread out all over

The bottom line: If you aren’t discovering which in social networking channels your customers spend time and include them in your ecommerce marketing mix, you’re probably  missing out on building relationships, community and increasing new customer acquisition through online word of mouth.

Leverage these five social media marketing tips for ecommerce to either get started with more social digital marketing or take your current social strategy to the next level:

Very few things in life promise endless options – digital and social media marketing being one exception. From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn to YouTube, there’s no limit to the number of social networking channels available for your business to leverage. Key to successful social media marketing for ecommerce is choosing the right channels to reach customers.

Find out where your customers are congregating by:

• Asking them. Sounds overly simplistic, but sending a formal survey to customers or more informally polling them on your website can provide a wealth of knowledge.
• Monitoring social sites. Use a free tool like Social Mention or Trackur. For something far more robust use tools like Radian6 to discover how and where customers are talking about your brand, your competitors or target keywords.
• Leveraging the stats. Some sites like Facebook are transparent when it comes to user statistics. Or leverage research conducted by third-party firms like eMarketer.
• Revivew backlinks, job postings, news announcements and keyword rankings of competitors on a regular basis to get a glimpse into their online marketing health.

Whether your ecommerce business is new to social media marketing, or just need to take your efforts up a notch, competitive intelligence can be very useful. Spend some time by conducting a competitive audit of your top five competitors on the social web. Include:

• The social sites in which they are active
• The type of content they publish on the social web
• The number of followers/fans/views they have on each site
• How they promote specific products, programs or events via social media

For even more inspiration and insight into what works well on the social web, look to ecommerce sites in other industries or even successful B2B social media examples.

In order for your ecommerce business to gain a following on whatever social channel you choose, entice customers with something they can’t get anywhere else.

For example, promote a contest via social media. Last fall, TopRank® Online Marketing leveraged this tactic for one of its ecommerce clients. TopRank used the client’s blog and Facebook fan page to promote a Halloween contest to name the best costume. This initiative not only drove additional traffic to the client’s website, but also helped increase the number of Facebook fans.

Alternately, offer an exclusive item to social media followers or fans, such as free shipping or a weekly coupon. You can also offer “breaking news” that does not appear anywhere else, like pre-product release announcements or an inside look at your company’s inter-workings.

The primary goal of your ecommerce site may be to sell products, but your social media marketing strategy should encompass a wider range of tactics that simply promoting offerings. With too much product pushing and not enough engagement, you’re unlikely to experience optimal success.

Incorporate some of these ideas into your ecommerce social media marketing strategy:

• Share messages or news stories from external sources
• Create a blog on your website and feed blog content to your social accounts
• Ask questions, participate in discussions or poll your customers via social media
• Post pictures from company events or videos from your CEO’s speaking engagements

1-800-Flowers maximizes the use of social media for its marketing efforts.

Many ecommerce sites leverage social channels to make it even simpler for customers to purchase their products. 1-800-Flowers has taken this idea to the max (see image above). It was the first ecommerce site to launch a Facebook store, allowing customers to browse and purchase its products directly through Facebook.

1-800-Flowers may be an extreme case, but ecommerce sites large and small can still indirectly sell products through their social profiles. For example, highlight new products or best-sellers and provide a link to the order page on your website. It may not be quite as simple as purchasing directly from the social profile, but it can be just as effective.

The five ideas are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ecommerce social media marketing. What social media tactics have you found to be successful?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Social Media Tips for Ecommerce Marketing | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Now that the iPad is officially available for pre-order, the question that we want to know from our readers is: Will you pre-order? The Wi-Fi iPad will be available on April 3, 2010, and the Wi-Fi + 3G models will begin shipping at the end of April.

You can choose to either reserve a Wi-Fi model for in-store pickup on the third or opt to have it delivered to your house. If you pre-order the Wi-Fi + 3G model, it will ship directly to you once it comes out.

So, to pre-order or not to pre-order — take our poll and then let us know why you are (or are not pre-ordering) in the comments!

Apple wouldn’t be Apple if it didn’t offer some totally hot, yet totally over-priced accessories to accompany a new product launch. If you pre-order an iPad for home delivery, you can add some accessories to your order. These include a dock (with and without keyboard, a protective case/stand, an extra power adapter and a VGA connector. Are you adding any of these items to you pre-order? Let us know!

Tags: apple, ipad, ipad pre-order

Recently, startup Cc: Betty, a nifty service that organized and managed group email threads, decided to rebrand and relaunch its service. The new product, Threadbox, was going to be streamlined and tweaked to appeal to workspace users.

Today, Threadbox is officially launching in private beta, as a more collaborative and user-friendly service. Essentially, the site aims to combine email, IM, and collaboration tools into one platform. Instead of focusing on email like Cc:Betty, Threadbox centers around collaboration in the workplace. The service organizes and logs every type of communications with clients, allows users to share documents and images, and record decisions and feedback. The new service also has the ability to serve as a project management tool, allowing users to share and track requirements and specs, then track and follow team members from start to finish.

Additionally, Threadbox aims to serve as a communications tool between employees, with the ability to gather comments, opinions, exchange feedback, share documents and media on the same page. You can add maps, files start conference calls from within the platform. And as the service’s name implies, all communications are threaded and organized according to client and subject. Threadbox still incorporates elements of Cc:Betty’s technology. You can received notifications of thread activity and reply to threads directly from your email client. It’s unclear if the service will integrate with social networks, like Twitter and Facebook.

The basic Threadbox service is free but the startup offers a premium product for $19.95 per year. Cc: Betty raised $500,000 in December of last year, and has $2 million in total funding now.

With Threadbox the startup is clearly making a play towards the work user; I’m doubt the average consumer will find the service as appealing as Cc:Betty was for personal use. But collaboration is the key word in enterprise-focused products at the moment, so Threadbox will certainly catch the wave of small to medium sized businesses which are looking to upgrade their communication platforms. However, this is a crowded space with many worthy players so the competition, which includes Yammer, Chatter, Jive, Socialtext, WizeHive, and many more products, will be tough.

Here’s a video from Threadbox that goes into more detail about the new service:

Foursquare means business. The 1-year-old startup now has a huge brand — Starbucks — using its platform to test out an experimental customer rewards program.

Starting today, frequent Starbucks visitors who check in at retail locations using Foursquare will earn customer rewards. Although there’s no financial incentive or free coffee to begin with, customers can unlock the “Barista badge” after five checkins.

Of course that’s just the beginning; the coffee behemoth plans to use Foursquare as a testing ground for alternative reward strategies and to unlock “the pulse of the experience” for each store.

If you think this is a straight-up play to offer location-based mobile coupons, think again. The New York Times Bits Blog writes that the company is “hoping to use Foursquare to provide even more meaningful prizes, like invitations to special events, photo-sharing or online reputation scores.”

As Starbucks figures out how best to leverage the checkin, we have to step back and appreciate the magnitude of this decision. With Starbucks on board, there’s no question that Foursquare has all the tools necessary to appeal to — and reach — a mainstream audience. Plus, now that a second company (the first was Tasti D-Lite) is tapping into Foursquare as a loyalty program platform, the additional proof of concept will pave the way for other businesses to follow suit.

[img credit: Bits blog]

Tags: foursquare, MARKETING, starbucks

Google has just rolled out the first version of the Google Wave extensions gallery, making it easier for users to take advantage of some of the cool add-ons developers are building into the service.

After making a big slash at Google I/O last year, Google Wave (the real-time communication platform that is still in preview) has re-gained some momentum, thanks to an improved API and the addition of e-mail notifications. The addition of an extensions gallery speaks to even more growth on the service’s part.

If you have a Google Wave account, you’ll see an “Extensions” item in your navigation panel. Click on it and you can see what extensions are available to install and then use.

Here’s a rundown of some of the extensions you can install and use now:

Wave Sudoku – Play Sudoku with a friend in real-time using Wave

Developers Extension Installer — Developers can use this to create an embeddable installer for extensions they create

Yellow Highlighter — Adds a yellow highlighter tool to your toolbar

Trippy — Useful for planning trips with friends

Video Chat Experience — Video chat in Wave

Pollo Gadget — Conduct polls and surveys across Wave

AccuWeather — See the weather of people in the Wave or from places you are planning on visiting

Once you install an extension, in most cases it is added to your toolbar and can then be accessed within a wave.

There are more extensions in the gallery and developers can submit their own to be included by going to this submission page for Google to review.

What Google Wave extensions are you using? Let us know!

Disclosure: Mashable has teamed with Google for the Google Wave API Challenge.

Tags: Google Wave, google wave extensions

I stumbled on a great typo last night. "Staff in the lobby were wondering around..."

Wandering around is an aimless waste of time.

Wondering around, though, that sounds useful.

Wondering why this product is the way it is, wondering how you can make the lobby more welcoming, wondering if your best customers are happily sharing your ideas with others... So many things worth wondering about, so few people actually taking the time to do it.

Wondering around is the act of inquiring with generous spirit.

Filed under: Food and Drink, Books, News

Lonely Planet has just asked me to edit their annual literary travel anthology for this year. I edited the first three -- The Kindness of Strangers, By the Seat of My Pants, and Tales from Nowhere -- and each time it was a tremendous challenge and pleasure. One of the things I've loved best has been publishing a mix of authors spanning the spectrum from best-selling to never-been-published-before. I think this has added to the richness of each book.

The title this year is A Moveable Feast: Life-Changing Food Encounters Around the World. The fundamental premise is that the food factor unites every traveler and every journey. Wherever we are, we all need to eat. And because we need to eat, food becomes one of the traveler's fundamental fascinations - and pathways into a place. On the road, food nourishes us not only physically, but intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.

I believe every traveler has some unforgettable food story - a larger-than-life feast, a mind-bending immersion in a rural market, the homemade, heart-opening treat shared by a stranger on a claptrap train, an adventure on the trail of an edible exotic. In all these tales, food is an agent of transformation, taking travelers to a deeper and more lasting understanding of and connection with a people, a place and a culture. And if they're really lucky, it tastes good too!

Continue reading Lonely Planet's 2010 Anthology: call for submissions

Lonely Planet's 2010 Anthology: call for submissions originally appeared on Gadling on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Social Business Community is lucky to have such an amazing group of thought leaders who regularly share their knowledge of Social CRM, Enterprise 2.0 – they publish their thoughts, interviews, research papers – huge thank you to all of them… all of you!

As this field of Social Business is still an emerging space and every day we see more and more people joining I decided to start this list of Social Business Blogs. Please add the ones that should be here and are not to this list. Link will be published on a right side bar of Social CRM blog.

Thanks!

And here is the list [so far]:

About 80% of your blog’s success comes from “ass in chair” time. That’s the time you spend writing posts, editing posts, finding the perfect image, connecting with fellow bloggers, answering comments, shaping up your SEO, and all the other tasks we teach you about here on Copyblogger.

You’ve got to get that stuff right. But great blogs are not built by “ass in chair” time alone.

There’s actually a significant element to your success that you may be neglecting with all that work and focus.

Every once in awhile, you might consider getting out of the chair and physically setting eyes on a fellow human being. I realize this is a bizarre, arcane practice, but bear with me.

Have you ever noticed that you don’t really know what a post is going to be about until you start writing? You throw something out there, and next thing you know, it’s gone in whatever direction naturally follows.

Believe it or not, you can actually replicate this phenomenon by physically locating yourself in close proximity to another person, with each of you taking turns speaking. This is called a conversation.

I know, you know all about conversation already. It’s answering blog comments, writing on your ex-girlfriend’s Facebook wall, and tweeting how cranky you are in line at the Genius Bar. But here’s something you might not know — “conversations” actually predate the internet.

Spend enough time in these “real world” conversations, and you actually trigger the growth of new neural connections. You come up with new ideas. You challenge your existing ideas and take them in new directions. You learn.

This phenomenon is improved by another old-school technique, called listening. It’s like lurking, except the other person can see you standing there, so at some point you should probably say something.

Conversation and listening can, if you let them, become awe-inspiring weapons in your blogging arsenal. They’ll give you a virtually endless supply of post ideas, angles for content, and insights into human psychology.

And they’ll improve the quality of your thinking, getting you out of the same stale perceptions and approaches to your writing.

Do enough of this and you will make friends. These are similar to Facebook friends, except a) you actually like them, and b) if they poke you, you get to smack them in the head and tell them to quit being a jackass.

Once you’ve mastered these fundamental tools, you may be ready to move forward to a more advanced practice.

You can practice conversing and listening with more than one person at once.

One place you can try this is an entrepreneur’s group in your local community. Generally the way it works is that you show up, pay something, they serve you a really bad lunch, and the real estate guy hits you up for business within the first 2 minutes.

Once you’ve detached the real estate guy, these can be quite fun. You can engage in listening and conversations with other people who are facing the same issues you are. Some stuff you’ll know a lot about, and you can teach them. Some stuff they’re going to be a lot smarter about than you are, which is when you want to shut up and take a few notes.

You can also go to parties. These are gatherings of people in one place for multiple real-time instances of conversing, listening, and friending, often accompanied by beer, tequila, and possibly pretzels.

These “parties” often include music, dancing, and laughter. Things may even liven up thanks to the noisy presence of one or more highly intoxicated people, who provide entertainment and a comforting sense of moral superiority.

I’m writing this post based on a dim memory of these old-school practices, since I haven’t done them for months. (OK, I did a warmup and had coffee this week with Grandma Mary, which was delightful.)

I’ve developed quite an impressive blogger’s tan. In other words, I’m about the same color as the surface of the moon. I’ve developed it by holing up in my basement office recording and writing content, editing posts, coordinating transcripts, and other 80% activities.

So I thought I’d try something radical. I’m going to work on my 20% and fly out to Austin today to hang out with Brian and lots of other friends for a few days at the South by Southwest Interactive conference.

Maybe you’ll bump into me having a margarita with a pal, crashing a party or two, or just wandering around the streets of Austin enjoying some unobstructed solar radiation.

We’ll be back next week. Maybe.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and a co-founder of Inside the Third Tribe. She solemnly promises this is the last “funny” post you will see on Copyblogger for at least one month.