You could also consider placing the articles on your website and having publishers that pick it up linking directly to your site.
I have a feeling that Panda will keep rolling out to a stage where links from content farms will be nearly worthless (IMO).
Regarding the guest blogging, yes the search engines will see it as duplicate content but that should only affect them websites.
For e.g If 2 high authority websites pick up the article, you will get 2 great backlinks and they will fight it out between each other in the SERP's
