1. Bloggers document history in making which can be invaluable for researchers who later try to make sense of an happening or a period of time.

2. Insights from blogosphere, at least in some areas, coalesce into an accepted body of wisdom fairly quickly. For example, the debate about desirability of DRM. Such debates could influence outcomes.

3. Debates about emotional topics, like existence of God or abortion rights, would likely make people veer to rational viewpoints, as progressively younger population see viewpoints otherwise disapproved by their religion or family.

4. More nuanced understanding of phenomena like terrorism, that affect large populations whose opinions drive the way their governments or other institutions act.

Together with easily accessible and constantly evolving wiki content or social booking marking, it could well be the most powerful process of accumulation ever seen in the history of mankind.

1. Do you want credit for your ideas? Academic papers will assure that your influence will be traced back to you. A blog may inspire many people (Some of whom may even write academic papers), and your insights may spread without giving you credit (I think this occured with respect to you and prediction markets already). If you want certain credit from future scholars in your field then you should concentrate more on academic papers. If you want to maximize your long term influence then a blog, though higher risk, is probably the better way to go about things. I say it is higher risk because there is a large track record of academic papers influencing others. Blogs haven’t been around, so they don’t have the track record. Therefore, even if many ideas have been generated by blogs, there haven’t been many major changes which are traced back to an original blog post.

2. As other people said, it shouldn’t be “or”. You should look into even more ways to influence the future. Books are also read long after they are published. In terms of spreading long term ideas, there are people who read books who don’t read blogs or academic papers. If you get the ideas spread widely enough then you are more likely to cause a long term change. You can start writing your blog in a way such that it will be easy for you to incorporate ideas from blog posts into a future book. The blog could also help create enough of a stir around the book such that it would be more likely to be considered important 10 years from now. That said, if you stopped blogging, you have enough friends who do blog that the advertising point isn’t too relevant.

The question isn’t are we advancing humanity by constantly learning new insights as individuals. The question is what happens if we stop. It’s like bailing out a leaking boat, no matter how much water you bail it’s going to keep on leaking, but if you ever stop you sink.

At the end of the day it’s more important to teach than to discover. Humanity could probably survive and maybe even prosper if academic progress suddenly ceased. However the consequences of us failing to communicate what we already know are simply catastrophic. We need people to dispel knowledge just as much as we need people to discover knowledge.

The question is which group you want to be a part of, while the boat metaphor does point out the futility in teaching I would also point out that for every person who helps bail the boat does float higher.

If u r interested in helping humanity, blogging is a new medium of publishing, and may turn out to accumulate, or u could make it so that it would accumulate, on which I have some suggestions for how to change blogs so they will be more likely to accumulate, which I will tell u if u r interested.

But safety is in the old method of publishing, which we know has led to accumulations.

Ur post only mentions one personal aspect of u, which is that blogging is fun for u, and it is of great importance to do what u enjoy as ur work if u possibly can, as life is short, and is getting shorter all the time for each of us, and u only get 1.

If u want to stay an associate professor, tenure is no longer enough, because of tenure review policies that can take tenure away, so u need to find out from ur colleagues what u need to do to keep tenure, if that is a goal of urs.

U seem to have come up with one really big idea, prediction markets, which in a world where there r few big ideas is a big advantage to u.

If u decide to publish, getting collaborators is very helpful, I have found, as it helps in so many ways.

I’d advise u to ask ur colleagues what u should do.

YES what your write on this blog feeds back into intellectual insights that accumulate over the long run.

Not to criticise (you already know I am totally in favour of you continuing to blog), but what are you trying to acheive in this post? Surely only those that are regular readers of this blog, and thus admire your work, will respond?
Some will furnish you with extra arguments, to be sure, but that falls prey to selection bias. I really want you to continue blogging, but if you want to answer your question honestly, then we’re not the people to ask.