Link softly, but carry a big stick :)

Some people have such juice (i.e traffic) to their blog that they when

they sneeze, the blogsphere gets a cold. In this
post from Scobleizer - Tech Geek
Blogger: Scoble uses his clout to try and either force or embarass or
punish Om Malik for having only partial text RSS feeds, because, as he
says "I hate those".

"[…]Oh, and Om Malik, I'm putting a lot fewer things from your feeds
on my link blog lately after you went to partial text feeds. I hate
those. But it's an effective way to get me to mostly remove you from my
link blog.[…]

(from: The
link blog effect)

So, what, is it "Link softly but carry a big stick?"