In my field blogs generally are thought to mean time wasted not publishing in "legitimate" journals - this is understandable even though there are so many high quality academic online creations. It's unfortunate too, for many reasons outside the scope of this post.
My blog is useful for me for gathering all of the Nights related materials I almost always randomly come across. It has been a constant inspiration for my legitimate publications and useful in my teaching. It has also been a place of global collaboration of all things Nights-esque. It's fairly safe to say that the role of a blog in the academy, however, remains far under the scope of legitimacy.
The MLA though, among other groups, has started to include digital humanities criteria for judging whether things like a blog are worthwhile. It has yet to catch on at any substantial level. The future, however, is certainly bright for the growth and centralization of online resources serving the humanities.
You can find MLA guidelines for evaluating digital work here - http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital
My blog has been cited in several peer reviewed academic writings and now a book from folklorist Christina Bacchilega (it might not seem like much but there are estimations that most peer-reviewed humanities articles are only cited 10% of the time – this article suggests 93% of humanities articles remain uncited anywhere else - alex-reid.net/2011/03/on-the-value-of-academic-blogging.html).
Here is the passage from the book –
“The fact
that websites are doing more than providing a wealth of folktale and fairy-tale
primary texts to those who can access the Internet is further brought home by
the multiplying of online publications, like the English-language Cabinet de Fees and Fairy Tale Review (both of which have issues also available in
print); discussion forums such as SurLaLune’s, which in the October 2000-June
2011 period had 3,761 average visits per day and 23,391 total posts on over six
hundred different topics; blogs, including Breezes from Wonderland by
Harvard-based fairy-tale scholar Maria Tatar and the one Michael Lundell has
maintained since 2007, The Journal of [the] 1001 Nights; and Facebook groups
like Fairy Tale Films Research” (10).
Bacchilega, Christina. Fairy
Tales Transformed?: Twenty-First-Century
Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2013.
Here is a complete list of other mentions, elsewhere, of this blog -
http://journalofthenights.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-journal-of-1001-nights-in-media.html
