One thing that's interesting about this article is that it's the canonical publication for a novel result. It isn't a blog post accompanying a paper -- it is the paper.

i agree. I hope this trend continues. I'm not saying that papers should be phased out, but the blog post is a good avenue for "micro" results which don't seem like they deserve to be written up in some dog and pony show of a paper but are still of interest to the general public.