I missed Mashup Camp last week because I was on vacation, but that doesn’t stop me from talking about the event with Amber MacArthur, Leo Laporte and Podbop (profile) founder Taylor McKnight today. Listen to the podcast here.

Weblogswork has posted a wiki with the 43 best blogs. I like the list because it is editable by anyone (it’s a wiki).

Welcome to the 43 Best Blogs Wiki. The following 43 blogs are simply the best. Other ‘best of’ blog lists offer 50 or even 100 ‘best’ blogs, but after painstaking research we have deteremined that there are really only 43 decent blogs at any one time.

Feel free to edit, add, remove or reorder any blog listed on this site.

How do we know that we have the right 43 blogs listed at any one time? Easy, you are the “we” at 43 Best. We are you. You spin me right round. Other lists depend on the work of one or two individuals. See your blog on the list? Grab the 43 Best Blog badge and put it on your site. Congratulations to the winners!

Lots of other best of lists there as well.

Add your blog!

Something about Guy Kawasaki’s post “How to Suck Up to a Blogger” bothers me. It’s like it’s saying “If you can’t be normal, here’s how to pretend”.

Some of the suggestions, like linking back to bloggers, are good ones. But some of his suggestions left a bad taste in my mouth. No. 5, on Friendship:

5. Make friends before you need them. Mediocre marketers try to befriend bloggers when they need them. Good marketers befriend bloggers before they need them. Great marketers have befriended bloggers while they were working at their previous companies. I learned this lesson well before the advent of blogs: the press connections that I made while employed by Apple have lasted twenty years. Also, make lots of friends. Today’s egocentric, self-indulgent blogger with five page views per day may well be tomorrow’s Technorati 100 stud.

This creeps me out. I don’t want people to be friends with me because they are planning ahead to the day when they need something from me. I want them to be friends with me because they like me. I don’t know Guy, but this strikes me as a very shallow thing to say. Friends should be to make your life richer, not assets to be leveraged.

Om Malik just gave us more great stuff to read every day with his new blog, The Daily Om. It’s a blog that he is going to use to talk about shorter items that may occasionally be off-topic from his primary hunting ground, GigaOm.

I love the idea. Some blogs, like my own TechCrunch, develop certain subject matter expectations from readers. Sometimes a writer wants to talk about things that may be a little bit off topic. Daily Om should give Om the room he needs to spread his wings and talk about non-broadband topics that take his fancy.

In Om’s case, he could write about cooking and I’d still read every word he writes - he’s one of the best and I spend a lot of time just trying to be a little bit more like him.

I’ve been writing about a cool new company called 3bubbles over on TechCrunch recently. It’s an on the fly chat feature that any blog can easily add.

I’ve added 3bubbles chat to techcrunch tonight. If you’d like to see it in action, just click on the Live Chat link at the bottom of any blog post. See you there!

Business Week has an excellent article about Ron Conway and his investment strategy. The article also talks about new search paradigms popping up in various startups who have nothing to lose:

The boom in startups suggests a technology renaissance ahead, and this could mean big changes for Internet users. While Google and other giants seem wedded to the current paradigm — type words into a rectangular box, and get a list of 10 blue links — startups are throwing caution to the wind. Without existing users to alienate, they can afford to rethink everything from the search interface to the formulas used to deliver info.

Ed Dunn is a guy that runs a search engine called Fooky, which I wrote about here. Ed is a controversial guy and regularly leaves comments on TechCrunch. Sometimes he supports me, and often he disagrees. He’s always taken reasonable positions, but today he accused me of some pretty bad things. I took offense and emailed him privately with my objections.

Well my dad just called and told me someone had accused me of being a racist. I clicked through to his link and saw Ed’s personal site for the first time. I found out today that Ed is an African American. And he’s just accused me of being a racist.

Ed, You are wrong. I’m not a racist. I never knew your race and it doesn’t matter to me a bit. But today you’ve called me a liar, a cheat and a racist I think that was uncalled for. The race card is a powerful weapon and you should use it very carefully.

Update: My wonderful email exchange with Ed:

—– Original Message —–
From: Ed Dunn
To: ‘J. Michael Arrington’
Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 2:47 PM
Subject: RE: your comment

I never called you a cheat and liar, I personally called you a subtle racist and a person with an agenda. The Wall Street Journal portrayed you as the unethical one and I suspected at all along. You talk as if someone need you after finding out what you are all about.

Simply put…Go fuck yourself clown.

Ed Dunn

—–Original Message—–
From: J. Michael Arrington
Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 1:37 PM
To: edunn@fooky.com
Subject: your comment

I always appreciated your comments, even when they took opposite opinions from me. But today you straight out called me a cheat and a liar. I’d appreciate it if you never came back.

Mike