A cartoon created by artist Rob Cottingham.

If you have an idea for a future comic or would like to submit your own BlueFur cartoon let us know in a comment.

Some of the biggest names in the blogosphere converged in Las Vegas a short while back for Blog World Expo, including such Internet famous individuals as John Chow, Darren Rowse, and Wendy Piersall. Even though Blog World Expo is nowhere near as big as some other Las Vegas trade shows, it proved to be a great venue for networking and knowledge-building. For this reason, the focus of this week’s In The Sphere is on exactly that topic: blogging, conferences, and trade shows.

First off, we have Danielle Nagami. She decided to pop by the booth of Unique Blog Designs to catch a quick snapshot. Nate Whitehill was busy chatting it up, but Danielle managed to get quite the fantastic group shot. Do you know everyone in the picture?

But why would you want to attend conferences in the first place? Deborah Ng answers this very question with the appropriately named post Why you should attend conferences. There’s a lot to learn, many people to see, and it’s a great opportunity to extend your brand with real-world interactions!

Etienne Teo may not have been able to make it to Las Vegas, but he is still a respected blogger with a fair bit of knowledge about this blogging game. As such, he describes five protifable ways to recycle your blogging content. Why reinvent the wheel when you’ve already got a perfectly good wheel sitting there ready to be used?

Even though you may view your blog as a hobby, it is certainly worthwhile to get a proper business card for real-world interactions. Neil Patel highlights a number of creative business cards that will certainly grab your attention and make you look twice. Stick out from the crowd and get noticed.

It’s easy to point out some of the classiest hotels on the Las Vegas Strip, but even dot com mogul Jeremy Schoemaker has a reason to live off the beaten path. Instead of choosing the Wynn, Caesar’s Palace, or the Venetian, Shoemoney much prefers to stay at the Stratosphere. I don’t know. The Stratosphere just seems so far away from everything else.

Earlier this week, the T-Mobile G1 with Google was officially introduced to the world in New York City. Now, the hardware itself isn’t all that exciting — you can read more about it here — but the bigger news is that the T-Mobile G1 is the first smartphone on the market to be powered by the new Google Android operating system.

Android is an open platform and it is meant to compete against Symbian, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and the Apple iPhone platforms in the sense that it is an operating system for a smartphone. Being an open platform, it works in a similar way as Linux, allowing developers to add, adjust, and alter it to suit their needs. It has some integrated multimedia functionality and can be construed either as a business or a consumer-minded platform.

When the iPhone first hit the market, people weren’t sure how the public would react. Looking back, I think it’s fair to say that Apple found resounding success with its first cell phone. With the introduction of the T-Mobile G1 — which is actually the result of a three-way partnership between Google, T-Mobile, and HTC — we’ve got to wonder how they go about marketing it so that it can enjoy a similar kind of success.

The biggest selling point, it seems, is the fact that Google Android is completely open and the Android Market won’t be as restrictive as the iPhone App Store. How would you go about marketing this phone? How would you be able to persuade iPhone fans to consider this alternative instead?

Duane Storey may be a nice guy and all, but a lot of WordPress users are reporting problems with his WordTwit WordPress plug-in. As you may recall, the purpose of this plug-in was to automatically post a tweet on your Twitter account each time that you publish a new post on your blog. It sounded like a very handy (and free) service and it worked just fine for some time. Then it started kicking back some errors.

While we wait for Duane to iron out those kinks, many of us are looking for alternatives. You may be okay with sending out a tweet manually each time you publish a post, but why would you want to do that if a plug-in can do it automatically. A possible alternative to WordTwit is pingPressFM, which works through Ping.FM.

Instead of just posting to your Twitter account, you can use Ping.FM to post to nearly 30 social networks around the Internet. In effect, pingPressFM can update all of these accounts with a link to your new blog post, potentially bringing in all sorts of traffic that you may not get otherwise. It’s the plug-in that we are using here on the BlueFur blog, in case you’re wondering.

Check it out here.

Last week we asked how would you prefer to live your life and 82% said a short but meaningful life. This weeks question is…

The general consensus is that you should never put all your eggs in one basket. If you are investing in stocks or mutual funds, you are encourage to diversify your portfolio. The same can be said about starting a business, because if your venture happens to have more than its fair share of troubles, you will still be a reasonably healthy position. That’s why you are oftentimes told to be flexible in the products and services that your business offers.

Well, there happens to be another potential strategy out there for you to consider and it just so happens to be the complete opposite of the “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” philosophy. It’s the “put all your eggs in the smallest basket possible” mentality. The concept here is to take specialization to the umpteenth level, offering ultra or hyper-specialization in a very specific product or service. This way, your business is highly targeted, approaching a very specific niche, and easily brandable. After all, you’ve got only one or two items on your product list.

An example of this idea was provided by Vancouver blogger Roland Tanglao a few months ago. This idea is for a Bare Bones Cafe where they serve nothing but espresso-based coffee drinks. There is no additional service, no additional product line. You will not find any drip coffee, free Wi-Fi, or even any tables. It’s just a counter and a barista. This sort of ultra-specialization may attract a crowd initially and the truly diehard fans, assuming that the coffee is good, will probably come back.

What are your thoughts on opening an establishment like this? The lack of free Wi-Fi would keep out the loungers, as would the lack of tables. Are you kicking customers out the door even before they come in?