There are more ways to "publish" work than in academic publications. I'm not sure to what extent it is unrealistic to expect academics to be keeping up with what is going on at industry conferences or on github or by talking to people at user groups or wherever, but the reality will always be that academic publications are not the only, or the most up-to-date, source of information.
Agreed, blog posts and open source projects can be just as helpful as journal-published articles. I didn't intend publications to mean only academic journals.
The problem is that many academics are not aware of anything outside the academic journals, and thus work on "unsolved" problems that already have well known solutions in industry.
I didn't think that's what you intended, but in the quote you included, the author is specifically lamenting the lack of knowledge of things published outside academic journals, not the lack of knowledge of things that aren't published anywhere.
