I just got my invite to the latest entrant in the Music Discovery/Community web world, called Jango.com. At first glance it seems to be a cross between Pandora and Last.fm but with a lot more Ajax and a really nice user interface. The jury is still out on the music selection though. They don’t have a lot of the artists that I like, instead they tend to have more main stream popular stuff. Hopefully that will improve over time. They are in invite only Beta now, so you’ll have to work a little to get your invite. You can go to the jango.com homepage to signup for an invite or give inviteshare a try.

You can read more about jango at readwriteweb

I’ve recently been doing online Marketing consulting with an ecommerce client. They’re an old school ecommerce company with not very sexy products. Never-the-less they’ve been around for a longtime and will be going public soon. So, as a part of the process I put together a list of 5 ideas for their internal marketing team to review and hopefully implement or improve. I thought I would share those 5 things here. I know that most ecommerce companies do most or all of these, but you’d be surprised at how many “old school” companies that are out there that do not.

1. Create a corporate blog, and brand it in a way that reflects your main site but also gives you the appearance of being an expert (which you should be). This is a good way to have an online presence that will possibly get you a new audience and get bloggers talking about you. Update it daily.
2. Blog marketing: make a list of all of the authority bloggers that write about products in your niche and spend an hour or less a day participating in their conversations. It’s important to do this without spamming them. If you participate in the conversation you’ll get more respect.
3. Be diligent about making sure sale items or breaking product/ technology news gets in front of the Digg, reddit and other social news sites audience. This could be huge. It might even be beneficial to do some sort monthly “overstock” item sale that’s by design just for the digg crowd. Everyone likes good deals.
4. Boost up your affiliate marketing: I’m sure you are already doing some sort affiliate deal through CJ or others. In my experience, affiliate marketing is one of the best and least expensive ways to get your products out there.
5. Be creative and unique: It would be awesome if you could create some sort of “contextual” ad network just for your products. Bloggers would eat it up, as they are always looking for ways to monetize their blogs.

The important thing to remeber is that all of these will work, but you have to be diligent and understand that it doesn’t happen overnight.

Here’s the deal… If you have a 3rd generation ipod that’s currently on the “fritz” you can take it back to the Apple store and they will give you 80gig ipod classic for $71. Apparently for a limited time apple doesn’t have any spare parts for 3rd genetation ipods so they decided to give everyone the upgrade deal. I took mine in on Sunday, under the advice of an Apple employee and was in and out less than 10 minutes. My “battery” was the problem with mine and they didn’t even turn it on to see if it worked. So if you have 3rd Gen iPod take it on down to the Apple store to get your new 80gig classic. If someone was enterpriseing enough I’m sure you could purchase a broken 3rd generation for next to nothing and then take to Apple for a new ipod classic. But hurry up because this will only last a couple of weeks at the most.