1. Blog posts are like preprints, but faster.
Even preprints go through some review before they're posted, just to
make sure they're not obviously crank papers. Blog posts don't suffer
from any prior restraint other than the need to take the time to write
them.
2. Blog posts don't end up in PDFs.
...and you don't have to write them in nasty complex formats like Word
or LaTeX.
Reference: why PDFs suck.
3. Blog posts are like papers, but better written.
Blog posts can be colloquial, funny, and sarcastic - unlike scientific
papers. Blog posts can also contain narrative in a way that scientific
papers simply don't.
4. Blog posts are often opinionated.
Papers go through multiple rounds of review and revision, in which the
naturally irregular and uneven surface of reality is sanded down
and/or bludgeoned into a cuboid that looks and sounds objective and
impartial. Blog posts suffer from no such fiction of objectivity and
impartiality.
(Self-referential case in point.)
5. Blog posts inspire feedback.
Perhaps in part because blog posts convey personal opinion, blog
posts are inherently more social, more interactive, and more open to
commentary.
(Presumably this will also be a self-referential case in point. Or not,
which would be awesomely ironic!)
6. Blog posts are free, open access, and indexed by search engines.
Kind of like preprints, but not in a PDF. Very much not like many
scientific papers.
7. Blog posts can be versioned.
You can have multiple versions of blog posts -- kind of like
preprints, but very much unlike papers.
Unlike either preprints or papers, blog posts can take advantage of
real version control systems like git. (Self-referential case in
point.)
This also further enables collaboration.
8. Blogs don't have impact factors.
Instead of a nonsensical and unrigorous statistic that signals to
other scientists how important an editor thinks your paper will
eventually be, blog posts are shared freely among an ad hoc
self-assembled network of enemies on Twitter and Facebook.
9. Blog posts can be pseudonymous.
There are many science blogs that are pseudonymous, and no one cares.
(This is actually really
important.)
This (along with the general lack of prior restraint, above) allows
unpleasant truths to be shared.
10. Blog posts are probably more reliable than scientific papers.
Because blog posts don't matter for academic reputation, there is
little reason to game the blog post system. Therefore, blog posts are
inherently more likely to be reliable than scientific papers.
I encourage people who disagree with this post to submit a commentary
to a respectable high retraction index journal
like Science or Nature.
--titus