Got mail from Alf Eaton about my earlier post on adding a conversational component to medical databases Eaton alerted me to a site called HubMed, which attaches trackbacks and comment forms in the References link from each article, as well as other good features like an RSS feed.

This is like a Third Voice (RIP) scenario, where commentary is appended to a page without needing to be hosted by the provider of the page. This is in principle a good idea, in that it is better than nothing, but in practice the awareness of something like Hubmed or Third Voice is usually so much less than that of the site it is pointing to that critical mass becomes hard to attain. Maybe PubMed should just buy HubMed....