I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, the peer review system was designed specifically to keep out the low-quality material that blogs let through

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, the peer review system was designed specifically to keep out the low-quality material that blogs let through for free because of their more inherently democractic nature; I can't be the only one who thinks many people who blog (and even some who appear on HN) are not presenting useful enough or clear enough material to be worth reading by any audience. People's lives are finite and time spent reading published work that is useless detracts from time spent reading useful work that helps in one's own line of inquiry. Smooth talking bullshitters like Ron Jeffries who promote objectively useless or even counterproductive methods abound, taking bandwidth away from more useful ideas. You need only remind yourself of this exchange: http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-solvers.html http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s... http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-work.html http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-w... It will be sad the day a Ron Jeffries of the academic world wastes as much of other people's time reading his posts. But has that day come already? On the other hand, it's not like the peer review system is immune to gaming and corruption either. We've got people chopping whatever work they've done into least-publishable-units and objectively good work being ignored because it is not like the other peer-reviewed work out there. And since most people working in a scientific field have not also gone through educating themselves against bullshit techniques (i.e., rationalism), we get plenty of bad papers that only serve to lengthen CVs (An aside: instead of chemistry, physics, computer science or other subjects, I think it is much better for one to begin a scientific education with a course in _rationalism_). In the meantime, I think a useful course of action would be to just do what sensible people are already doing, which is to throw our hands up with respect to relying on any _system_, be it blogging or peer review, as a channel for useful information and continue to be unbiased about evaluating the usefulness of any communication, disregarding its source. As for blogging your scientific work, sure, go ahead, but I would be as responsible about it as I would a peer-reviewed publication, if not more, simply because of the larger audience. This is not to say that it decreases the set work you can put out in blog form, as another fundamental difference is in how finished the work in a blog versus a paper is. But place ample disclaimers if you do frame it as science. I think the root problem is really the motivation for blogging or writing papers in the first place. Is it motivation to get fame and money? Or to use these channels at "face value"; that is, as forums in which useful things get posted? I have not come up with a solid, brain-dead algorithm (which is necessary because I am biased as well) that would distinguish between these sources of motivation given a set of postings/papers, but with a little thought perhaps someone can. Or maybe we shouldn't tie so many extrinsic rewards to blogging/publishing papers. Then the problem would "take care of itself."