A cartoon created by artist Cameron (Cam) Cardow.

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

It’s Friday, so that means it’s time to have a look at what people are talking about this week. We scoured the web in search of interesting blog posts and while they are plentiful, we had to narrow it down to just five. Whether you’re looking for some Internet marketing tips or a nice chuckle to start your weekend, we’ve got you covered.

Courtney Tuttle is a guy that wants to help you make money online for free. Court has some great advice in his own blog, but he also realizes that he simply cannot be the definitive source of money making information. As such, he’s hand selected the top 7 Internet mentors you can trust. Why is John Chow not on the list? Because he’s an evil panda killer, that’s why.

Darren Barefoot says that he never has a shortage of topics to blog about, but he just doesn’t have the time to write them all. As such, he’d rather spend the time reading what you have to say in the 55 more blog posts he hopes you write. There’s quite a few topic suggestions there that would certainly make for some interesting reading. Now hop to it.

Aldian Prakoso reminds us that we should definitely focus on the long tail niche. He takes a case study of a 17-year-old girl who is pulling down $70,000 a month from Adsense alone, thanks to her hugely popular site filled with free MySpace layouts for teenage girls. I guess she really understands that demographic.

Think Referrals attempts to explain the American subprime mortgage crisis to Canadians. We’ve heard about the real estate crash in the States and how so many homeowners are facing foreclosure, but what does it all mean and where did it all come from? Before you ask, no, subprime does not refer to getting a mortgage rate at less than prime.

The Bird Man’s Blog is providing the comic relief to this edition of In The Sphere, discovering a rather interesting promotional product. The Bird Man calls it the sexy towel. Who knew that some cotton stitched together with an interesting print could be prove to be so funny.

Okay I know it was posted here that you should consider adding BlogRush on to your blog to get more traffic. I agree that right now it is probably a good idea as it is still in the new smell stage. Like anything though I am predicting it here and now BlogRush will be over run with spammers.

Yesterday John Chow used our RSS tutorial to show how to bring your top post to your BlogRush instead of whatever you are blogging about right now. What John did not say is that you don’t have to direct your link to your blog you could link it to anything.

Spammers will eventually figure this out and you will start to see ads on BlogRush instead of blog posts.

If you have installed BlogRush keep a close eye on the links your suggesting to your visitors. If you have not installed then I would suggest you don’t bother.

Yesterday, I talked a bit about BlogRush and how it is supposed to generate “free” traffic for your blog. The other major service that was released around the same time, as I’m sure you’re well aware, was DealDotCom, a Woot! style website with Internet marketing products for sale on a daily basis.

Both of these services gathered quite a bit of steam before their official launch dates and some may attribute that to the exposure they received through John Chow dot Com. John wrote about DealDotCom three days before it launched, getting people to sign up for something basically sight unseen. No one had any real idea what the final website would look like or how successful it could be. They couldn’t even confirm its legitimacy, but the affiliate program sounded so lucrative that people just couldn’t pass it up.

John then wrote on power of hype and sure enough, both BlogRush and DealDotCom received massive spikes in traffic even before they even had a product or service to sell. That’s the power of hype and that’s the power of building some viral buzz. In this way, you can see that it’s very important to start marketing your product even before it becomes available; this way, you start with a huge client base instead of having to try and slowly grow it bit by bit.

There are growing pains, of course. Both BlogRush and DealDotCom have had their share of problems this past week and it is thanks largely to the overwhelming interest in their respective services. I think you’d agree, though, that this is a much better issue to address than the issue of trying to find users/customers/clients.

On a side note, be sure to check out the DealDotCom plug-in coded by our very own Gary Jones.

So we receive a lot of feedback and found a few glitches that have been fixed today. We have pushed out a version 0.3 which has both a graphical (made by Rainer) and a text version for you to choose from (see pictures below).

This version also includes a width feature you can edit on the text version.

This script is still in Beta so use at your own risk. We will wait a few more days to see if any other bugs crop up. If you find anything wrong or any suggestion feel free to post them.

UPDATE - Okay I found a few other issues and they have been cleaned up. Version 0.4 is now up and ready for testing.

UPDATE – I pushed out a small update on Version 0.5. We have caching and a vertical display in version 0.6 coming soon.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past week, you’ve surely heard of BlogRush by now. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a service that is set up to share traffic in the blogosphere and it works very much on a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” system. You can see the widget in action over at Beyond the Rhetoric near the end of the sidebar.

For every impression that the widget gets on your site, you earn a credit which will then be “spent” on an impression over at someone else’s blog. You get a temporary linkback and hopefully a visitor to that other site will hop on over and visit your blog based on the catchy title that you’ve given your latest blog post. It also helps that the referral program goes ten generations deep.

This concept will work great for big blogs like John Chow dot Com, because he already has referrals down to the 10th generation. In this way, his account gets credited with a whole whack of hits, resulting in even more publicity and exposure for the supposed panda killer. But what about smaller blogs?

Even though I’ve only been running BlogRush on my blog for a few days, I was curious to see how it was performing and, well, things aren’t as bright as one would hope. The traffic I have received is minimal at best, but I am not alone. Even the almighty John Chow is only getting a 0.33% CTR (click through rate). That’s one-third of a percent! He hopes to increase this figure by controlling the headlines displayed.

With that, I open it back up to you, my fellow BlueFur enthusiast. Have you joined BlogRush yet and what has your experience been thus far?