Welcome to another edition of In the Sphere, Bluefur’s weekly roundup of what’s interesting and noteworthy in the blogosphere for the week that was. We tried our best to stay away from the mushy stuff related to tomorrow’s festivities, since you could already be suffering a little too much stress related to that anyhow. On with the speedlink!

We start off with Jeremy Shoemoney Schoemaker. While many of us respect this dot com mogul as a very successful entrepreneur, Jeremy is constantly reminded that he is a failure. Life isn’t easy, so you shouldn’t be afraid of failure. These are all learning opportunities in disguise.

Is the iPhone an epic failure? Ed Lau recently reformatted his touchscreen cell phone and, for the life of him, couldn’t remember what applications he had loaded on there in the first place. He asks you if there are any useful iPhone apps. We know about the fun ones, but which ones are actually useful?

With money the way it is, we are more attracted than ever to anything that is free. Scott Young reminds us, though, that just because it won’t cost money doesn’t make it free. You like that free cell phone? You’ve got to sign a contract for it. Think of the opportunity costs!

Continuing with the somewhat frugal theme, Darren Barefoot has realized that he’s worn the same watch for eight years. Well, if it isn’t broken, why fix it? There are plenty of people out there with watches much older than that and they’re still ticking despite all that licking.

Finishing off today’s roundup is Stoney deGeyter. While it may sound like a complex and convoluted subject, you too can do SEO. Search engine optimization can come off as being quite cryptic at times, but you have to stop over-thinking it and just do it.