Mary Hodder's one of those people whose thoughtful nature prompts her to ask probing questions, often in a very gentle voice.

In addition to the great work she's done recently creating Speaker's Wiki for potential speakers post BlogHer, Mary's put a ton of thought--and research time--into a series of posts that are all worth a read, even if it means printing them out and carrying them around.

The line-up:

• Link Love Lost or How Social Gestures within Topic Groups are More Interesting Than Link Counts: a research--and nuanced--account of how influence and networks can be measured along with page rank to check a blog's influence.
• A piece on keyword search and the blogosphere--specifically a Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work for Keyword Search with a KeyWord Search Comparison Chart.
• And the amazingly detailed and useful piece that is a "Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work," with a related PDF file of comparison of how Blog search works.

Sample Mary quote 1: "For many bloggers the relevant sphere of influence is not overall popularity, as those indexes express. It's influence and connection within a community. And the relevant measure of connection isn't the number of connections -- it's the depth and impact of those connections. This is about celebrating the niche, and measuring engagement over time."

Dig in and read the rest...Mary's got stuff to say, so if you are not reading her, you should give a look.

PS: As you can tell from her post titles,Mary's also got an appreciation of 18th century literature.