i hate to break it to you man but rollerblading is never going to get the respect that other sports get simply because it just plain looks goofy.  people going fast and jumping off shit might be hard, it might hurt your feet, but the vast majority of the people see it as the same thing as running and jumping off stuff, except you roll away...doesnt take much skill, you just have to be dumb enough to do it.  granted some of the rails people do are gnarly, but at the same time, someone standing on top of a rail and sliding for a long time while the whole time theyre dry humping the air to keep their balance simply doesnt look that awesome.
skateboarding allows a whole lot more variety, gets a whole lot more support, and there was really never a time where most of the population was hating on it.  and if you havent noticed, the whole skateboarders saying rollerblading is gay has kinda been over for a solid five years now just because we dont care anymore.  i wasnt being serious in my response, and if you didnt pick up on that, then i guess you were too busy havokrolling to understand the many intricacies of my post.
the nike skateboard team is dope.  prod is getting a whole lot of media coverage and is slowly becoming a household name to even those outside of skateboarding.  however, i dont think that there is a single rollerblader that people are going to know from the nike team...not that ive looked, but i dont really think i have to.  come to think of it, i really dont think that there is a single rollerblader who is well known to the general public, except maybe those two asian brothers who do like triple backflips in the halfpipe.  i mean, its crazy, but it seems to have become more of a novelty sport than anything.
rollerblading is not 'blowing up'...far from it.  the only time you may have been able to say this would have been around '97 or so, when the rollerblading/skateboarding fued actually existed, before a good chunk of the rollerbladers quit.
and please dont be so ignorant as to claim that me wearing nikes is supporting rollerblading.  i mean honestly, do you really think that any reasonable portion of money coming from my purchases is going to the rollerblading team?  it probably represents about .001% of their entire revenue, the funding for the rollerblading program.  and no, i do not listen to dipset, im sure you can understand the reasons why simply by listening to any single song for 10 seconds.  by the way, i hope you dont get the idea that rollerblading is suddenly 'gangster' because dipset supports it...
the thing about rollerblading is that it is not in its early stages.  people hated on skateboarding in like, 1968.  since then, its been pretty well recieved by most young people, albeit a lot of the more traditional folks still see it as a bunch of hoodlums vandalizing.  skateboarding has grown quite a bit since it started, and has had support the whole time.  rollerblading, on the other hand, has been around for quite sometime itself, and still is not even close to the point that skateboarding was at twenty years ago.  dont act like its something new and just needs time to get off the ground.  its had plenty of time to try that, and the fact of the matter is, its just not that rad.
so you can continue to go around calling people 'ignorant ass haters' all youd like when you have no idea whats going on yourself and all you do is talk down to skateboarding.  wait a minute...i suppose that ill give the credit here and apply your oh so brutal insult back to yourself because it seem so fitting in this case.
rollerblading is not some revolutionary sport that were going to be shocked by sometime in the future.  its going to continue on as being the sport that no one really cares a whole lot about and just keeps on existing in the background while everyone else goes on with their lives and doesnt so much as think twice about where rollerblading is going in the coming years.
sorry bud.