One interesting bit in a generally pretty silly piece from the NYT on blogs and books:

Cass Sunstein read a discussion of one of his articles about conservative judicial radicalism on The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog organized by Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in which Sunstein was invited to respond. "We had an interesting exchange and there were a lot of comments," said Sunstein, who teaches law at the University of Chicago. The discussion even spurred him to make changes to "Radicals in Robes," the book he was writing at the time. "There's no question that 'Radicals in Robes' was affected by a kind of pre-publication review on a blog," he said.

While the Volokh Conspiracy is not my ideal set of "peer" reviewers, this is a powerful anecdote about the way blogging is opening up academic exchanges that go beyond the traditional peer reviewing process.