Blog lite: I’ll be making a quick trip to Los Angeles on Thursday and Friday and will be blogging only if and when I hit patches of wi-fi. On Friday morning, I get to “moderate” a discussion with Rafat Ali.

What Barry Parr said: One reason RSS makes publishers anxious. My translation: Things we choose not to understand always make us anxious. (via: iwantmedia.com)

What Dave Winer said: A blog without ads is itself an ad, interesting to a small number of people. Blogs with ads, like their print counterparts, strive to be as broad as possible, to reach as many people, and in doing so, lose their value as an ad for the author.

Missing the point: Heather Green must be an influential blogger because she influenced me into pointing to this piece about “the search for influential bloggers.”

Unfortunately, this is a classic example of what goes wrong when one tries to apply a mass-media/mass-marketing mindset onto a personal medium. Ineviatably, “influence” will be equated with mass and link-popularity. However, in reality, “influence” is not always measured by the quantity of people who link to you. It’s the “who,” not the how-many.

Moreover, bloggers are NOT omni-influential. Jeff Jarvis may influence my perceptions regarding media, but his Dell-ranting is not going to influence me. (It may entertain me, but am I influenced?) If mass-marketers try to “figure out” the blogosphere with some sort of “measurement tool” rather than by joining in the conversation and “belonging” to the blogosphere, they’re missing the point and will remain clueless outsiders.