I almost ducked this question because I’ll inevitably leave someone out that I should have mentioned.
Let me try to answer in the following way. There are a large number of people I talk to on a regular basis and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from them. There are also some groups I’m in that are like pools of experts – TECHSHOW Board, Blawg Channel group. The people I talk to also expands and evolves over the years. For example, there’s a set of blogging experts who I talk to regularly that I really didn’t even know a year or so ago.
There are some people, however, that I pick up the phone and talk with, or they call me, on a regular basis, or who I consider my go-to people. They are all brilliant, but under-appreciated, at least in my judgment. If you did a study on me, you’d find the following, plus a few more, are the people I tend to turn to when I have a thorny issue or want to think something through.
Big Picture – Marc Lauritsen, Michael Kraft
Internet – Jerry Lawson, Tom Mighell
Legal Tech – Dan Pinnington (in fact, I spoke to him this morning), Jeff Beard
As I said, there are lots of others and some people who it was very difficult to leave off this list, but if you limited me to six choices, in these categories, that’s my list right now.