There are rumors going around on the Internet that YouTube wants to better invade your living room. You can already access YouTube videos through different media players and home theater PC setups, but it seems that Google wants to have even better penetration, possibly beating out a traditional TV subscription.

As the rumor goes, consumers will get a set top box that is connected to their YouTube account. YouTube tracks the kinds of videos you and your friends enjoy, creating a “random” playlist that fits in with these interests. The playlist is then streamed to the set top box in the living room, continually moving from one video to the next with little to no user interaction. This mimics the experience of watching traditional television, but in shorter clips.

So, what does this have to do with marketing? Should this idea truly take off, it is very well possible that YouTube could start offering advertising opportunities among these generated playlists. Advertisers could buy 30 second spots to insert their videos, not unlike television commercials through the conventional channels. Executed successfully, this could prove to be a major revenue source for YouTube and Google.

What do you think? From both a consumer and an advertiser’s point of view, would sponsored videos among your streamed playlist be a good thing or a bad thing overall?

Search engine optimization is a very important whether you are running a small blog or you are trying to promote your business website. If you have WordPress as your chosen content management system, you also have access to a wide range of plugins and customizations that can aid you in this effort.

An oldie but a goodie in this realm is SEO Slugs. This WordPress plug-in accomplishes one very simple task, but it does it very well. In short, it shortens the “post slug” portion of your URI, removing superfluous words. This generates a shorter URI and one that is more easily indexed by search engines like Google.

The example used in the plug-in main page has a blog post called “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings.” If left at default, the post slug in WordPress would be “/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings”. By using the plugin, the slug is automatically shortened to “/immediately-higher-rankings.” That’s shorter and more efficient.

For more information and to download SEO Slugs, head over to vretoolbar.com.

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.