Blogging and Traditional Scholarship

There is a reason for existence for this blog and if I were to describe it at least partly I'd point to the links below.
First an article from a blogging and law pundit:
Volokh, Eugene, "Scholarship, Blogging and Trade-offs: On Discovering, Disseminating, and Doing" (April 2006). Berkman Center for Internet & Society - Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship Conference Paper Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=898172 

Then in the same vein of opportunity cost of both blogging and traditional scholarly work (i.e. serious journal publications) we have Arnold's Kling article in TCS

"...
Scholars and Reaction Time
Both the Web and the traditional academy reward citations. When you write an academic paper, it is important to cite others' work, and it is important that your work in turn gets cited. On the Web, readers want you to link to interesting related material, and your readership comes from the links of others.
However, the traditional academic setting favors the careful scholarly researcher. The Internet is more about reaction time. I will be the first to say that this works to my comparative advantage. I attempted to measure this by gathering data. I compared my hits on Google Scholar with my hits on "regular Google," and then I compared this with results for several other economists. This is hard to do correctly, so the table below should be taken only as an approximation. Still the results seem to make sense.

Economist Scholar Hits Google hits Ratio
Hal Varian 11.3 178 16:01
Greg Mankiw 12.2 645 53:01:00
Paul Krugman 21.7 3590 165:01:00
Brad DeLong 3.65 1030 282:01:00
Tyler Cowen 0.91 466 513:01:00
Arnold Kling 0.04 325 7558:01:00

The last column in the table reflects the Internet's "amplification factor." That is, it measures the economist's salience on the Internet relative to his salience in the academic community. The Net boosts my salience the most. In an environment where what counts is reaction time, I do well. Hal Varian does the "worst" by this measure. His scholarly production is high relative to his Internet salience. Note that in absolute terms, Paul Krugman is the highest in both. Greg Mankiw does better than Brad DeLong on scholarly recognition but not on Internet recognition.

If you believe that the right measure of scholarship is the academic one, then the results in the table may seem horrifying. Intelligent laymen who get their economic information from the Internet may start to diverge from those who get it in college. I actually think that could be a good thing, but, as you can tell, I am not in a position to offer an unbiased view.

..."

In a way blogging decreases information acquisition costs for the laymen, increases scholar's popularity and offers an immediacy in the discourse which scholarly journals have difficulty to replicate. For the scholar the key lies in the opportunity costs and the behavior of their marginals, marginal cost of blogging is the opportunity cost of dedicating a unit of time (normalized to 1) to a traditional scholarly research. I guess the symbiosis will come through when SSRN or JSTOR put a blog where authors will discuss and debate their WIP (work in progress) thus decreasing the opportunity costs of blogging.

It is quite probably that other factors would influence such a transformation, academia is still somewhat a Pythagorian-like elite with reluctance to change (on a lighter note Gary Becker though has a blog.)