No! Not at all. Not in the least! Anyone can setup a blog, and call themselves an expert. It’s so easy to make a blog. Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, you can have any of them, and many others, setup within a few minutes. You can have your own domain for less than ten bucks. The bar of entry is so low that we shouldn’t even consider it a bar of entry at all.
How do you evaluate someone’s expertise on something then? That’s an incredibly difficult question. Firstly, I look at what they write. Does what they write make sense? Sometimes you can gain invaluable knowledge from someone who is unknown in the industry. But, the old saying that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing is particularly true in the blogosphere. Just because you see someone spit out a couple of golden nuggets of wisedom, doesn’t make them an expert.
What’s their background? Generally, people acquire expertise through experience and knowledge. Be it the school of hard knocks, or the ivory tower, the best experts generally got there by making a major investment of their time into a subject. That doesn’t mean that someone who popped up on the web with a blog yesterday is not an expert, but I would be looking at their motivation for blogging.
Having said that, I’m removing the “Small Business Blog” from the title of my blog. My small business is moderately successful, and I’ve only been at it a couple of years, and I do not consider that enough to crown myself with the title “expert”. What I write here is from my own experience, and from the many books I’ve read (I go through several a week), and from what I’ve learned from others.