Ten new voices.

Halley has a challenge for bloggers that she calls "Ten New Voices." She's asked folks (many of whom are not me) to list ten bloggers with some limits on who can make the list:

1. Five non-white men.
2. Five women of any color.
3. Any three of them must be non-Americans

I'm not very interested in digging up new voices, but this did pique my interest in who I've linked to already. I've been writing here for not-quite-a-year, so I have some history to look at.

I made a list of every link I've used, sliced it and diced it a bit, sorted by frequency, and I've discovered that:

• The sites I link to the most by far are IMDb, Wikipedia, and Amazon (i.e., links for reference).
• The first individual on the list is Talking Points Memo at spot number six (linked ten times).
• The first individual woman in the list is Michelle Malkin at spot ten (five links).

I could make some more observations, but they'd be boring.

Anyway, finding five women in my link history is easy. I could have named them off the top of my head.

1. Does This Look Infected? I started reading for her banter posts, but I enjoy the other oddball stuff too.
2. Raging Red says she's quitting, but I'm hoping it's an April Fool's prank.
3. Abigail's Magic Garden provides some liberal commentary to chew on.
4. Body and Soul had a fantastic post about Eason Jordan.
5. I'm shocked to discover I haven't actually linked to JeSurgisLac, so I'll fix that right now. She talks about America from the UK.

Finding non-white men among my links is harder. Since my computer turned up nearly 1000 unique links in over 450 unique domains, I haven't checked them all for nationality, race, and gender, but I found a few.

1. Barack Obama's blog is the official blog of our non-white Illinois Senator who I linked to in a post about an ideal President, if that tells you anything.
2. Adam Yoshida is Canadian, and I linked to him after the election.
3. Geomblog had some nice election maps I linked to.
4. MFDH is a white male Canadian, so he doesn't quite follow the rule. Also, I've never linked to him before, but I've been reading him for eons.
5. Chrenkoff is from Australia, and I linked to him here.

Let me review now the lameness of this effort.

• I broke Halley's rules once (by including a white male).
• I broke my own rules twice (by including people I hadn't actually linked to before).
• I'm late; the challenge asked for this in March.
• I had to struggle to find non-white men, but finding non-Americans was easier.
• While I would have liked a real analysis of my (copious) linking, I'm just too lazy.

This is actually less lameness (or should I say more robustness) than I was expecting. My shame is lessened further since I'm not one of the eleven she actually asked to meet this challenge.

From looking, I can't tell if I link to women more or men more. What I can tell, clearly, is that it's not a total shut-out for anyone in Halley's list. I'm pretty pleased about that.