I say the new Scripting News is a "noteblog," to differentiate it from a Twitter stream and a WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr-style blog.
The new format is inspired by the pre-2006 format of Scripting News.
I switched from that format because:
Google Reader didn't like my feed with little snippets, they insisted that a blog post be a title, link and description.
Twitter looked like the future, with their API and Internet-scale notification system.
Now Google Reader is gone, and Twitter doesn't look like the future anymore. Most of my ideas don't fit into 140 chars, and the Twitter API stopped being a place to build new user experiences.
Now that Fargo 2 is maturing, I brought back the shorter posts, and mix them with links, to writing on my own site, and elsewhere.
For writing that's not full enough to be a blog post, but too full to fit into 140.
I would call them medium posts, but someone else already thought of that.