Might want to look at some other blog numbers (blogline feeds):
MotherJones - 89
Common Dreams - 104
Seattle Times, Politics - 9
Democracy Now - 2
CommonsBlog - 168
NYT Education - 279
EducationNews - 7

And there are many library, teched, and other specialized blogs with less than a couple of hundred blogline feeds. Maybe for a specialized area, your numbers are good.

I have looked at some other Bloglines blog numbers, e.g.:

Lessig blog - 6072 subscribers
Freedom-To-Tinker blog - seems to be around 750 total

The ones you list are very much a non-tech audience, so of course they aren't big Bloglines users.

I'm doing better than most, in relative terms - but I'm far, far, from the level where I can have much effect, in absolute terms.

But, most of those sites are fairly established in their areas of expertise, and somewhat influential, or at least often pointed to by others.

"Democracy Now" has more than a handful of audience. If it only has 2 Bloglines subscribers, then that says something about the demographics of its users, not how many there are. Similarly, I imagine way more than a few hundred people read the NYT Education overall.

Actually, I think you used the wrong feed for Democracy Now, this one has 203:
http://www.bloglines.com/preview?siteid=13324

Though the point still holds.

I think your influence may not be correlated to your number of subscribers. NYT Ed, as an example, can be email, paper, or rss and its influence is from reputation as well as number or readers. It would be hard to know which medium is mainly responsible for bringing a topic up for discussion. (Blogger could read the paper, rss could be forwarded as email, newscast could discuss editorial or what is being blogged about it.

Also, its audience consists of general readers who may only be looking at one issue from the range of topics and may be silent consumers as well as readers with professional interests.

I have read your work, looking through lens of educational tech as well as interest in political issues. I think your influence is larger than you give yourself credit for. But it must be frustrating knowing that the ideas should be better known and discussed. Thanks

Thank you for the kind sentiments.

Let's put it this way - my influence is about 1/1000th (one-*onethousandth*) of what it would be if I could more easily get past various gatekeepers. It is indeed very frustrating.