Want to create a color palette out of an image?  Look no further than Pictaculous.  This online tool will let you upload any picture and then with wacky server side voodoo magic will turn it into a selection of colors you can use in your next web site layout.

How does it work? First thing you do is browse to the picture you wish to upload and base your color palette on.

Next, you grab your color palette!  Not any rocket science needed here.

You can copy and past the HTML color codes into your CSS files, or download the color scheme as an Adobe swatch file.  You can also socially share your color selection (although I am not sure why you would want to) or e-mail it to yourself to have for later use.

So why is this handy to have? Well, when designing your web page, you might have one big main picture as your focus point – and you want the rest of the layout to match it.  This gives you a very simple way to do this.  Also, you might just be looking for a unique source for color inspiration when designing.

You can try it out for yourself at Pictaculous.com.

As you can see – I have added the sidebar widget on my web site and so far I haven’t noticed a darn person leaking in via this deal. It could be too soon to tell though if this is going to be a winer or a loser.

Mashable!’s opinion seems to be you should be careful:

The buzz this weekend is focused on BlogRush, a traffic sharing service for bloggers. It’s literally everywhere. But many of us have seen these things before, and it’s worth noting that none have survived very long. Here are some notes we compiled from our Web 1.0 experiences.

John Chow seems to like it – then again, he is an A-lister who will probably get more out of this than anybody:

Let’s face it, without traffic it’s pretty hard for a blog to make any money. The more traffic you have, the more money you make. Everyone wants more traffic and we’re always looking for more ways to get it. Internet Marketing kingpin, John Reese, has came up a great way to help your blog get more traffic.

Blogrush, you only have a limited amount of time to impress me, so you had better hurry. I’ll give this a shot for a while then report back with the positives and negatives. If you want to join me in this little experiment sign up yourself with BlogRush and let me know your results.

Update: Well I am unimpressed and this whole thing seems sort of lame to me. Looks like they weren’t really ready for prime time. Taking the widget off my site for now – might be back later on once they get the bugs worked out.