The blinn is purely a material. the texture would be loaded via the color channel in the blinns attribute editor. this will then bring up your texture window to choose a 'file', you cant then go and search for your texture on your hardrive.

Maya doesnt store your textures, it merely references them to a location or folder on your PC. so it could be something like C:// documents and settings/texturesfolder>woodtextures> bark.jpg or something like that, so it sounds like your converter needs to be told where to look

_Jay