In reply to Brynn Hibbert.

My suspicion is that for some time yet "the paper" will remain the major route into "the pieces" of the research process at least for human readers. And it seems like a good place to try and measure the worth of those pieces because it can provide a focus for people to interact around - a thing that they understand and value. The wider question of how "good" any particular piece of published content is is probably the biggest question facing the web today. Will we just re-aggregate around big brands again (except now those brands may be people rather than news providers or publishers)? Or will we trust a more fluid network of friends and machine systems to provide value measurements depending on what we need?

Credentialling will be important, who do you trust when they say that they trust something? But those credentials may not look like today's do. One of the great strengths and simultaneously weaknesses of online communities is precisely that they don't respect traditional credentials in many cases. You have to earn that respect in that community, which doesn't sit well with people who expect to have their position valued. This is a loss on all sides tho, not just for the communities or the potential contributor. So we need to find ways of bringing reputation to the table and that is a big unsolved problem.