I think I write differently when I know I'm putting it out immediately. You have to be a little nervous about putting your first draft before a world-wide audience. But having said that, I'm not sure it's really changed my writing that much. Part of the experience with Delirium was that I got sick of the Web. I wrote the fourth installment longhand and didn't put it on the Web.
Literary fiction is all about distribution and readership.
That's all you should care about. If not, you're in the wrong genre. Academic work is by its nature hypertextual. Unlike fiction, you want to immediately be able to access footnotes, link to another relevant passage, link to another book. Instead of a bibliography, where you go to the end of a book, look something up, take that next book out of the library that pertains to what you're studying, instead, you just click and it takes you to that book, and the process of research is rendered instantly more efficient.