There's work being done in this area; whether it is going to be ultimately successful I don't know. In terms of generating metrics better than journal publicat

There's work being done in this area; whether it is going to be ultimately successful I don't know. In terms of generating metrics better than journal publications and citations, there's projects like this: http://impactstory.org/ http://impactstory.org/ (no connection, I just heard of them in this context). These kind of metrics would have addressed the OP's "blogger" problem. Another strand, which at least my small scientific field is pursuing, is to facilitate citations of datasets, or dataset+software combinations (think of it as making a directory structure citeable). This (in theory - it's a recent development) rewards people who take their time to clean up and give open access to their datasets, instead of doing the minimum to extract a couple of papers out of it and move on.