David, it's my job to be overly optimistic and enmeshed in the world of technology and content ownership isn't it? And yours to pick out the holes in my arguments :-)

More seriously I think what I have in mind is much more modest than a full A4 sheet of closely argued commentary. What I'm interested in is precisely the off the cuff commentary and small pieces of related information and connections that already exist, but largely in a closed form in the margins of PDFs or in emails to colleagues, or perhaps as notes in your own database.

The reason for focussing on the control issue is precisely because people change their minds, realise they've got something wrong, and want to retract or modify. But the bigger question is how you create a market for these pieces of content that make people want to make them available. If they are on someone else's website then you can't even start with that.

The issue is a bit less as to whether the small number of people who might be commenting at the moment are worried about it, and more about how you make it easier for all of those people who aren't to add value and get value back out. My view is that the message from successful web-based systems is that pub-sub is a better model when you can get it to work wells so the question is how we might be able to make systems that make this more natural for the average scientist.

If the technology worked (which it mostly doesn't) then the idea of a feed of stuff being generated by each individual would seem a sensible kind of model - after that it can be syndicated by databases, journals, media, educators etc etc. But you lower the barrier to communication so as to make it easier for people to filter. In a sense this is a way of solving the identity problem, which is fundamentally about _re_-aggregating all of this stuff under one person's name by putting it there in the first place. It just seems a more natural pattern to me.

Behaviour is a problem - and I'm tempted to just say people should grow up, but human nature being what it is...nonetheless I am a great believer in the power of sunlight. If you do play in the open then you tend to behave more respectfully, or at least I find that I do. I probably bin 50% of the off-the-cuff comments that I start to write online. My personal belief is that communities will evolve online with quite distinct rules of behaviour - we just need to figure out what works. If science remains secretive and uncommunicative it will just dissappear - those that communicate both to each other and the public (and government) most successfully will survive and that will by its nature involve being online and being as visible as possible (ideally for quality not quantity though)

And as for all those papers that aren't worth commenting, well I would say they're not worth publishing as papers. Just should be dropped into a database. If it's not worth arguing about the details of what it means, or it doesn't change things to the extent that it is worth discussing, then lets treat that as a small, but valuable, piece of a bigger puzzle. Or to put it another way, if it isn't worth post-publication peer review, then why should we spend the trouble on peer reviewing it in the first place?