There is a video clip posted on YouTube that collects several words of wisdom from Will Smith. Some people may view him as just another Hollywood actor, but the man who you previously knew as the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” actually has some very good advice for both your personal and your professional life.

At one point in the video, he tells us that there is no point in being realistic. If you go into any project or endeavor with the outlook of being realistic, you can only hope to aim for mediocrity. Instead, Smith suggests that you should be unrealistic and wait for the world to catch up.

It is unrealistic, he says, to think that flipping a switch on a wall will turn on a light. Thomas Edison didn’t think so. It is unrealistic, Smith says, to think that you can bend metal and fly people across the ocean. But people like the Wright Brothers didn’t think so. It is with “unrealistic” viewpoints like these that we are able to push the human potential.

What does this mean in the business environment? While you certainly shouldn’t go where angels fear to tread and take unnecessary risks, it does pay to take some chances. Take a more unrealistic viewpoint and imagine what is possible. Even if you aim for the stars and come up short, you may end up on the moon.

You have a lot of choices when it comes to the e-book reader market these days. You could easily turn to something like the Amazon Kindle, because it’s already a recognized brand with direct connectivity to a large online store, but it’s still missing something: color. The Barnes & Noble Nook may have that secondary color display, but what about the primary screen?

One suitable alternative that you may want to consider is the upcoming Elonex 710EB e-reader. It’s not exactly the best known of name brands, but this device does look quite attractive on paper. Instead of using an e-ink display like the Kindle, the Elonex has a seven-inch TFT color touchscreen. This is similar, in some ways, to the experience that you may have with something like the Apple iPad.

Other notable features on this portable e-book reader are its ARM processor, built-in Wi-Fi, eight hour battery life, and quite possibly a series of other applications that go beyond reading Jane Austen and Charles Dickens novels on the go. Based on the initial renders, it’ll be available in black, though it’s unclear whether other colors will be a part of the product portfolio as well.

Look for the Elonex 710EB e-book reader to launch at the end of this month with an asking price of about $210. That’s less than half the price of the entry-level iPad, but it’s debatable whether you are losing half the value as a result too.

Are you a woman? Are you a communicator? Do you live or work in the Madison area of Wisconsin? If that happens to be the case, then you’ll definitely want to know about the Association of Women in Communications, Madison chapter. They also happen to be a BlueFur customer.

Members of AWC-Madison come from all sorts of different professions, but they all have one thing in common: they are all related to the world of communications. They include professional writers, designers, corporate communicators, freelancers, students, and all sorts of other folks who work within communications. Not sure if it’s for you? Guests are always welcome at their chapter meetings.

Learn more about the organization on their website to see what they do or, better still, attend one of the events listed in the online calendar and see for yourself in person. You can register from the site too.

Do you use BlueFur as your preferred web host? Let us know and we can feature you in a future blog post. Send an email message to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted.

WordPress 3.0 comes with a whole series of new features that were not available in earlier releases of the popular content management system. We’re now starting to see a lot of great themes that take advantage of these new features and one of these new themes is Twist of Ten.

With this theme, you’ll have the ability to configure all sorts of items related to your blog’s appearance through the main user dashboard area in the back end. These includes custom headers, custom background, custom menus, and more. Further still, the theme comes pre-packed with both a primary menu and a secondary menu. Eight predesigned header images are also included.

Going through the Appearance section in the WordPress dashboard, you’ll be able to add or remove banner advertisements in the header, activate sidebar advertisements, define the location of the search box, show random featured pages on the homepage, or include a front page welcome message should you so choose. You can also configure it so that a new random page is shown with each home page refresh.

To download, view the live demo, or get more information, go to PressCoders.com.

Let’s take another stroll through the wide world of blogging by visiting some great posts. Enjoy!

Lesley Chang starts us off with a discussion on how she maintains her work-life balance. We all want to succeed, to be sure, but we want to have a life too. That’s why she watches television, plays World of Warcraft, and draws a bath as needed.

Sports Unknown approaches a somewhat touchy subject. What appears to be a “fun” tourist map of San Francisco is anything but drawn to scale and is not necessarily meant to be 100% accurate. That’s acceptable and to be expected, but is this map racist. It is interesting to see the omission of so-called “black” neighborhoods.

Misti Sandefur takes a moment to share what she’s learned about SEO. If you want your website to rank well in the search engines, you’ll want to pay attention to some of her tips. For example, go ahead and use the different header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.), but do so sparingly. Also, when you syndicate your content, be sure to include a link back to the original post.

Buzz Bishop lets us know why the Calgary Stampede is such a big deal for the people of Cowtown: it’s their Christmas. The people of the city are happier and generally more festive during the Calgary Stampede, as long as festive means wearing jeans and cowboy hats. The $170 million of financial impact helps too.

Darren Rowse shares a conversation he had at a recent networking event. Do you know the difference between influence and fame? Is your goal to be influential or do you simply want to be famous? Why do you want to be either one in the first place and what do you hope to accomplish by becoming influential or famous?

Many mainstream media outlets have started to embrace social networks like Facebook and Twitter, openly promoting their corresponding accounts on programs, print media, and other locations. For instance, some news broadcasts may have the anchors’ Twitter handles displayed beneath their names at the beginning of the show.

By doing so, Twitter is effectively getting free advertising. However, it is important to use these core domain names, because the general public is generally more trusting of a large brand like Facebook or Twitter. If you are a smaller company, it may be better to promote yourself as twitter.com/accountname, since people know and understand Twitter.

On the flip side, what if you want to harness some of that branding and marketing muscle for yourself. If this is the case, you may opt to use a redirect URL of some kind. For instance, instead of the above example, you may use yourdomain.com/twitter. This uses your own domain and reinforces your own brand. However, there may be trust issues here.

A random Internet user may not be familiar with your brand and, as such, may become suspicious of that redirect URL. Who knows if it actually leads to your Twitter profile page? That’s why it’s critical to establish trust in your brand. This way, people won’t second guess when you use a more convenient and easier to remember redirect URL.