The blogosphere has a wealth of information for us to enjoy, so let’s see what it had to offer this week.

Dough Roller provides a fantastic guide on how to avoid donating to a fake charity. It’s important to give back to the community, but you want to make sure that your charitable donation is going to the right people and being used for the right purpose.

John Chow co-wrote a book with Michael Kwan and he wants to encourage his readers to buy it. If you go ahead and buy a copy of Make Money Online, you have the opportunity to win an Apple iPad. Take a picture, write a review, and you might win two iPads!

This Eclectic Life took a moment of her day to visit the Cosmic Cafe in Dallas. It’s a vegetarian restaurant and, in Shelly’s own words, the eatery offers an “out of this world” experience. The exterior artwork is certainly interesting!

Freelance Writing Gigs recognizes that most freelancers don’t want to work for free, but is there value in doing so? Focusing on the traffic ramifications, the article asks whether guest-blogging works. Well, it depends. Getting a guest spot on a big blog can provide referral traffic for years.

Web Worker Daily has found a great way to revisit the Internet. Have you ever found a great page to read but don’t have time to read it right away? Perhaps you should try Postponer. Available for Google Chrome, this utility is like a specialized version of a bookmark tool, marking pages for later reading.

As the way we choose to consume information on the Internet continues to change and evolve, so will the methods that advertisers use to reach their audiences. People are motivated by money, to be sure, so you need to work with advertising models that are mutually beneficial.

You may have already heard of MyLikes. The ad platform allows users to post sponsored “likes” on their blogs and Twitter accounts, typically getting paid on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. MyLikes has now expanded to allow for monetization through YouTube videos.

Since it can be difficult to track outbound clicks from a YouTube video, the CPC model doesn’t work for this new ad product through MyLikes. Instead, the sponsored videos are paid on a per-video basis. The publisher chooses his or her own rate and the advertiser can then seek them out, “hiring” them to produce a video.

It’s up to the publisher how the sponsored product will be featured — as a video review, as product placement, as a sponsor message, etc. — but the method of featuring the product must be described up front. This way, the advertiser can know exactly what to expect.

Will YouTube soon be inundated with many more monetized videos? Just as AdSense opened up click-based advertising to the average blogger, MyLikes video ads could open up that format to new publishers too. After all, not everyone has the reach and capacity for privately-solicited advertising.

When you need to update your blog on a regular basis, you also need a good way to keep track of your different post ideas. Some people choose to collect these ideas on a notepad, either digital or paper-based, but these can be easily misplaced and forgotten. You could set up a series of “drafts” in WordPress, but those can get buried too.

The Post Ideas + WordPress plugin was recently highlighted on Blogging Tips as a better way to organize your post ideas. It’s not the fanciest WordPress plugin, but it does offer a very valuable functionality.

In short, it creates two widgets on the main WordPress dashboard. With one widget, you can quickly jot down your post idea for later writing. With these post ideas, the plugin provides fields for the title, a description, tags, links, and priority (1-99). The other widget allows you to write a post based on one of these ideas.

When you do so, the post idea “draft” is automatically deleted and a new “write post” webpage is opened for you to start writing. The title field is prepopulated with the title you defined in the post idea, but the tags, links, and description do not automatically carry over. Hopefully, this will be addressed in a future update.

For now, check out Post Ideas + by Matt Hobbs in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

A big part of having a successful business is finding a way to adapt to the needs, fulfilling the new needs that your customers may have today that they may not have had yesterday. This is why companies spend so much money on research and development.

However, this does not mean that you must constantly develop and release brand new products. What it means is that you have to ensure that your customers are still satisfied with what you have to offer. In this way, it is very possible to take an existing product and re-market it in a slightly different way.

Yesterday, we took a look at the LUXA2 H4 iPad Stand. This looks like an innovative and useful product, but it has actually existed since well before the iPad did. A smaller version was created for the iPhone (and other similar smartphones) and even this larger H4 format was originally created for the Amazon Kindle.

It’s about marketing and targeting. LUXA2 (Thermaltake) recognized that many people are now owners of the iPad or will soon be owners of the iPad, so they wanted to have a product to capture this new customer base. The H4 Holder is their answer and it seems to fit the niche quite well.

Yes, new products can be fun and exciting, but a reimagined or repositioned “old” product can be just as lucrative.

Do you have one of those new Apple iPads? It seems like such a wonderful piece of technology for casually surfing the web from the couch or watching a video on your bedside table, but what if you can’t be bothered to actually hold the device in your hands? This is especially true for movie-watching!

Catering a more luxurious end of the market is LUXA2, a subsidiary of Thermaltake, with its release of the LUXA2 H4 Holder. This metal desktop holder will securely grasp onto your Apple iPad, allowing for a handsfree experience from any angle. It is fully adjustable and can be freely rotated, depending on your specific needs.

By using a desktop stand like the H4, the iPad can become a great digital photo frame, an ebook stand, or all sorts of other applications. The stand is made of solid, thick-cut aluminum, so you know it’ll be very sturdy as well. In addition to the adjustable pegs that’ll hug the sides of your iPad, the silicone backing adds a semi-sticky surface for your device too.

While it is certainly catering to the Apple iPad market, the H4 Holder can be used with any number of similarly-sized devices, including the Amazon Kindle. For more information, head over to the official LUXA2 website.

BlueFur web hosting may be based out of Canada, but that doesn’t mean that its entire customer base is also in Canada! There are customers all around the world who recognize the value and reliability that BlueFur offers, including those from the United States and even further abroad. Like in Asia, for example.

As it turns out, Opera Hong Kong is a customer of BlueFur, hosting its website on our servers. Opera Hong Kong is the first opera company ever established in Hong Kong, formed in July 2003 as a non-profit charitable organization. It adds a great deal to the cultural scene in the cosmopolitan city, promoting local musical talents.

Should you choose to make a trip to Hong Kong, be sure to check out the upcoming events calendar on Opera Hong Kong. For instance, Manon opera in five acts plays on May 6 and May 8 at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Grand Theatre. Tickets range from HK$150 to HK$880, which works out to about $19 to $114 Canadian.

If you are a BlueFur customer and would like to be featured in a future blog post, send an email to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted. Free press!