The economist has a nice, short article out featuring two science sites: researchblogging.org and Nature Networks. The author finds that There can be no doubt that the scientific community is starting to use the socal web tool more and more and that it is accelerating science. That media outside of science are noticing this is evidence of these developments. Along with the incorporation of these social tools will come publishing reform, i.e. the move away from pre-publication editor-based assessment towards post-publication peer-based assessment. The article didn't really go into the intricacies of this movement and actually got a few things slightly wrong (or at least ambiguous) about blogs and traditional, peer-reviewed publications. But even still, the developments have gone so far by now, that even outsiders a beginning to take note of a change in how we do science.