Caoimhe recently finished her thesis on "weblogs and the Irish Blogosphere". She used some data from a sample of questionnaire-ees among whom I am counted. Before I miraculously appeared on Caoimhe’s list of Irish bloggers I wasn’t aware of much of an Irish blogging community, but I’ve since gone on a little quest to find intersting countrymen and -women.
My main resource in finding said interesting people is Planet of the Blogs, an Irish blogs aggregator. It’s much better than that hateful IrishBlogs.ie (which is still spamming my referrer logs some weeks after I started to complain—I must follow up on that). I’ve been browsing that site for a while, clicking through to potentially interesting sites and subscribing to those that live up to their promise. Those subscriptions have been crammed into my "Irish" folder in my Bloglines subscriptions (publicly viewable).
I’m not saying that the nine sites in that folder are the best in the Irish blogosphere, or that there are no others worth reading. I couldn’t possibly know that. But they all caught my attention and kept it long enough for me to click on the little blue Bloglines button. I will continue to collect.
Update: IrishBlogs.ie has fixed its crawler so the spamming has stopped. There’s nothing like going over the top in your criticism to get people to listen. Thanks for the update Roger.