My supervisor Tony Morgan and some of our team are doing a live webcast from our Greenville Campus on strategy and some other things right now.

I studied Religion and English Literature in college. Basically, I wrote papers, edited papers, and then wrote shorter, better papers. On repeat. And now I use those skills to make websites.

The most neglected, necessary skill in making great websites is the ability to write effective, succinct copy. Designers spend hundreds of hours making pixel-perfect websites only to have them filled with inconsistent, thoughtless copywriting. Too often, sites that look great on first pass fall apart when anyone tries to interact with them and actually DO something.

If you want to make websites that people use instead of just stare at, put time into learning to write clearly, concisely, and appropriately for each context. If you know you’re no writer, please HIRE ONE. Your users will thank you.

A man without a smiling face must not open a shop.
— Chinese Proverb

Wikipedia has a massive list of company name etymologies. Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company? For real? Wachovia is actually the Latin version of the German word for North Carolina? Fascinating stuff.

Crowdsourcing: if I wanted to procure a delicious steak, and I was on business in the metroplex of Oklahoma City/Edmond, OK, where would I go? (Please do not say “Oh, Outback or Longhorn” like our hotel desk clerk did.) Any help would be appreciated.

1. Fly to Oklahoma with NewSpring friends to hang out with other friends
2. Miss my wife. A lot.
3. Work on her new website
4. Give the new InCase Backpack the Does-It-Annoy-Me-While-Traveling? road test
5. Deal with my MacBook Pro’s recently recurrent sleep/energy/battery life issues

I’m surprised it took someone this long to make this a real product: The Green Letter Bible. It of course plays on the whole words of Jesus in red letters theme with “verses and passages that speak to God’s care for creation highlighted in green.”

I’m giving Sifter a spin with the 30-day demo right now, but it looks to be a simple and well-thought out bug & issue tracker. Subscriptions start at $14-a-month and go up to $99 based on storage/projects. Related: you can read more about the behind-the-scenes design process for the tasty icon on on Jared’s Christensen’s site.

You might think to yourself “it sure would be hard to fill 12 pages of a Flickr photostream with Tab-related memorabilia,” but you would be wrong. My friend Liz once had a Tab sweatshirt that simply stated “Tab’s Got Sass.” True story.

Art Basel Miami Beach, the self-professed “most important art show in the United States” begins today. You can follow blogs covering the festivities via Google.

In an effort to completely negate the heartfeltness of the previous post, and because I certainly need another tome devoted solely to typography, the soon-to-be-released Typographic Desk Reference has been added to my Christmas list.

For our part, The Blankenships are trying to make as many of our gifts and as much of our packaging as possible this year. You can find out more about what other folks are doing at Advent Conspiracy or on their blog.

If you’re on the East Coast, you can see Venus and Jupiter in the evening sky these days. It admittedly took me awhile to wrap my head around how that’s possible, considering Earth is “in between” Venus and Jupiter, but I’m all better now.

Our holiday shopping has unearthed all manner of ridiculous products (need a flashing-light, Santa-hat-clad animatronic singing dolphin yard ornament? Try K-Mart.) but this snowman stopped me in my reindeer tracks. Who designs this kind of stuff?

For more Fail, try the helpful video Know Your Meme: FAIL or go directly to the Fail Blog for more examples captured in the wild.

It’s one thing when tech geeks are popular on Twitter, that’s to be expected. But let’s face it, most folks don’t know who Kevin Rose or Robert Scoble are. They’ve got 115k+ Twitter followers between the two of them, but are unknown outside tech/web circles. They’re weblebrities.

But now Shaq is on Twitter. John Cleese is on Twitter. Lance Armstrong is on Twitter. Dave Matthews and Imogen Heap are on Twitter. Parkman and Daphne from Heroes (the actors, not the characters they play) are on Twitter. How weird is that?

These are people that average people see on TV, listen to on their iPods, and read about in magazines. These are people that non-web-nerds actually know of. The thought of Twitter becoming a mainstream, ubiquitous platform is hysterical to me, but I wonder if all the speculating the tech community does on such things is actually starting to become reality?

Oddly enough, I am apparently the only person on Flickr who has used the tag “Be honest, isn’t searching for a remote, picking it up, and clicking a button like 50 times more complicated than clapping?”

“Cell reproduction without a purpose is called cancer.”
— Tim Keller

Just because something is growing doesn’t mean it’s healthy. That goes for your company, your employees and yourself. Bigger and faster don’t necessarily mean better, they just mean bigger and faster. Smaller and slower don’t mean worse, they just mean smaller and slower. Grow intentionally in the direction of The Mission.

You do have a mission, don’t you?

At $29.95 for an almost-300-character typeface, I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of YouWorkForThem’s Agostina in the coming months. Mike Cina gets it done, as always.

Semi-sequitur from the previous post: pick-up How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff if you’re fascinated by statistics (or just looking for something interesting to read.)

I’ve been using daily data tracking site Daytum for a few months now, and it’s starting to get interesting. For example, in tracking the hours I spend doing various things, I play more than I work, I eat more than I drive, I work on my website(s) more than I exercise, and I spend more time sleeping than anything else. Nothing shocking, but it’s always nice to have paperwork to back up your suspicions.