He has a new post on his blog. It seems to me that it should be fairly easy to implement a first approximation of a preprint feedback site using the mathoverflow software. Namely one can have a new site or a section of mathoverflow.net where instead of questions people post descriptions and links to their preprints and instead of answers they get feedback on their papers. The point system of mathoverflow is slightly different from what Tim Gowers suggests, but on the other hand I don't think that it is possible to create the perfect way to award points before some working implementation actually exists.

Do you think that making such a site makes sense? Would the people behind mathoverflow be willing to do it? It seems to me that the changes to the mathoveflow backend should be minimal. Actually one could already use mathoveflow.net to post links to preprints if the rules allowed it.

@Scott Morrison : I'm not sure how I feel about allowing such questions. However, there is an easy solution which would get rid of (some) of the crank type questions : simply disallow requests for comments about papers posted to GM and only allow requests for comments on papers that have actually been posted (non-academics have to jump through a bunch of hoops if they want to post their papers).

+1 to Angelo.

In particular, if one wishes to (as in fact I do) to be up-to-date with what is happening on arXiv, one can anyway subscribe to the daily-mailings of arXiv (in subject categories one is interested in). And, some people include in the meta-data of their preprints the explict request for comments. Of course, in that case the comments would not be public, but actually not sure if this is good or bad, yet if one really wishes to 'visibly' comment on an arXiv preprint one can: one just would write a blogpost, and there will be a trackback on arXiv (if I understand correctly).

If there is enough interest, it seems like the proper thing is to make an Area 51 Stack-Exchange proposal. When the website gets off and running, it could be posted here, just like with the theoretical physics site. The software could work well for this purpose, but I agree that it probably would dilute MO.

Wow, Hypothes.is sounds incredibly ambitious. I find it somewhat off-putting when they introduce it with statements like "Humanity stands at the edge of greatness" and respond to concerns about gaming the system with "Reputation in distributed systems is a mature field of study".

I'm hesitant to predict that Hypothes.is won't become widely used, because that's what I thought about Wikipedia. On the other hand, it's also what I thought about Citizendium.

@Jose Figueroa, thank you. The link was cute. Now I can't stop "markdowning" and making examples Hypothes.is.

maths? mathematics? two times?

Also, I think tricki.org is not relevant to the main thrust of this thread. However, given tricki.org and Gowers's weblog postings, I think it is clear he is interested in modernizing the process of doing mathematics, or at least doing collaborative mathematics.

Gerhard "Also Interested In Modern Process" Paseman, 2011.12.15

Sorry for resurrecting the post but there is an ambitious project EuDML (pdf here) which is geared towards making (European) Mathematical literature freely available.