A MINOR DUST DEVIL swirls among Irish bloggers concerning expert lists. What began as a well-intentioned attempt to expand the same old circle of experts who comment to mainstream media has descended onto familiar turf of balanced perspective. Since one measure of balance is gender, anyone listing a paucity of one gender or another will face challenges from parts of the Irish blogging community. You cannot slight someone for revealing a listing of those who inform their judgment, even if it reveals a compilation too white, too dark, too Irish or too male. Just as you cannot slight contributors who do not know men from women. ("Bernie" can be male or female. You have to listen to know for sure.)
My listing of people includes essayists who rarely blog, designers who keep their best work in the analogue world, thinkers who take photographs and creatives who take me to a different space through their voices and music. Unfortunately, my listing does not fit into the cookie cutter style of this discussion so it's something I'll talk about at BarCamp Southeast but not before a podcast I will release on that day.
An aside: the first Google advertisement to appear next to this post was for Irish DNA Testing. There is no better way to keep the nationality straight than by declaring one's genome as a qualification for entry to a national experts database.
Damien Mulley -- "A shared Subject Matter Expert List of Bloggers"
James Corbett -- "Here's my experts list"
Mary Gilmartin -- "Talking of Expert lists"
Keith Bohanna -- "Useful list of Irish women bloggers"
Male amature (sic) blogger -- "Expert bloggers"
