Robin Hanson: Will academics respect blog postings?

Pertinent to the discussion on academic vs. "amateur" sabermetric research, Robin Hanson posts at Overcoming Bias:

"So can we create an academic blog world, where blog posts get academic credit? If someone gets a Nobel prize for developing an idea that was first explained in someone else's carefully written but short blog post, will that blog author be celebrated, or will he be ignored as the sort of distraction that academics can't be expected to pay attention to?"

Worth reading the whole thing.

Also from Hanson's post,

"People almost never look up ten year old newspaper columns, but they do often read ten year old academic papers. So an academic paper may still have a better chance at long term influence than a newspaper column."

The latter quote is why I think that publishing research in "By the Numbers" is valuable, even if that research is already published online. As BTN editor, I admittedly may be biased, and a lot of people disagree with me on this – Tangotiger, for instance (see comments starting here).