As we all know, the number one rule of the blogosphere is that you must write about the blogosphere (it’s like the opposite of the Fight Club), and in the absence of a “bitchmeme” for this weekend — although Twitter’s intermittent issues come close — we have some link-trolling extraordinaire from Henry over at Techcrunch, who has parsed Techmeme’s links for the past four months or so and come up with a list of the top tech bloggers (according to Techmeme, that is).

I was pretty chuffed to find my name in the number 9 slot, up there in the top 10 with stalwarts such as Larry Dignan, and of course Mike Arrington and Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch. Although it seems that my place at number 8 could be in jeopardy — that relentless new guy, ParisLemon (aka MG Siegler), is apparently going to get moved into my position once Henry combines MG’s posts at ParisLemon with his posts at VentureBeat. (Update: Henry says he’s not combining multiple authors, so I am safe in the top 10 apparently). As they say at the Oscars, it’s an honour just to be nominated along with such talented, etc.

One of the amazing things about this list (apart from my presence on it, of course) is the size of the disparity between Mike Arrington and the rest of the list. In less than four months, he has written 207 Techmeme-headline blog posts (that presumably doesn’t count his posts over at Crunchnotes). That’s an average of almost two posts every single day. I’ve averaged a measly one post every two days — and if I could have cranked out one more I would have beaten that bugger Thomas Ricker at Engadget. Is that why I’m writing this? Of course not. Just saying :-)

From my pal Paul Kedrosky comes a video clip from new Wall Street Journal tech video-blogger Andy Jordan, who went out into the park to see whether one guy’s iPhone would help improve his social life or not. Kara Swisher of All Things D has a clip of Andy explaining his new gig.

My friend and former journalism colleague Mark Evans points to a piece in Business 2.0 magazine with the enthusiastic title “Tech IPOs: They’re back!” The story talks about “champagne corks are popping in Silicon Valley,” and how this year could be the best one for technology stock offerings since the bubble burst in 2000. But is that a good thing? It is if you’re a venture capitalist, presumably, since you get a (theoretically) nice exit. But is it good in any other sense?

Don’t get me wrong. Obviously, a public market is a handy thing to have when trying to build new businesses, since it gives entrepreneurs an alternative source of capital, and it encourages VCs to lend because they know they will be able to get their money back as opposed to having to cross their fingers and hope Google or Yahoo buys their little investment. But the breathless tone of the Business 2.0 piece makes me distinctly uncomfortable. You can almost see the exclamation marks littering the article — the same way they are dotted throughout the spam stock emails I get (and I’m sure you get) hundreds of times a day.

In fact, the Business 2.0 article reads like something out of a magazine you might find in a hair salon or at the supermarket checkout, with headlines like “Short skirts are back!” and “10 ways to tell if he’s cheating!” and so on. Then we get the obligatory nod to the irrational exuberance crowd: “To be sure, smooth sailing on Nasdaq is never guaranteed,” the story says. Gee, ya think? And then it’s on to the six companies that are “likely to strike it rich!” Terrific. Larry Dignan over at ZDNet does some hype-popping of his own here.