Better: Blog Comments or Peer Review?

Jeffrey Young asks “What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?”
And continues:
“That’s the question being posed by an unusual experiment that begins today. It involves a scholar studying video games, a popular academic blog with the playful name Grand Text Auto, a nonprofit group designing blog tools for scholars, and MIT Press.”
The article is in today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed, titled “Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better.” The book to be reviewed is “Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies” by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego.
Mr. Wardrip-Fruin and several colleagues also fun the blog “Grand Text Auto.” The blog offers an academic take on interactive fiction and video games, and is read by academics, readers from the video-game industry and video-game players. The plan is to publish parts of the book on the blog and request comments. The publisher, MIT Press, will, simultaneously, have the book peer-reviewed in the traditional way, allowing for “side-by-side comparison of
reviewing old school versus new blog. Mr. Wardrip-Fruin calls the
new method ‘blog-based peer review.'”
Complete article at:
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1322n.htm