I've thought about wikis, and taking notes of things I read, but those things take too much effort to do. At the moment, I'm searching my Google Reader items and using http://historio.us to catalog articles that I read and think are valuable. It works well because it takes just one click to add an article, but I don't always remember to add what I read.

A few thoughts about what I would want for a system like this:

* It needs to find a balance between in-your-face and hidden away. It needs to be displayed prominently enough, that I remember to rate and review it, but it should not get in the way of what I want to read.

* It should have a rating system of some kind. Maybe on a scale of boring to interesting to changed my life forever.

* It should be in plain text, or able to be exported into plain text. Maybe make it YAML formatted as well. That way, if I want to run an analysis to see which domains have the highest-rated articles, or search them for a certain keyword, I can.

* It should support tags and categories so that I can somewhat organize them.

* Add a field for a summary (and allow me to decide whether I want to require a summary or not). That way, I end up with a very useful annotated bibliography that I can reference to later. I could determine what the key points of the article were without having to re-read it.

Of course you would want public/private, people wanting to use it purely for their own benefit can choose to stay private and not have their interactions aggregated.

However, it's not sustainable in the long run. I currently have five filing cabinets of notes and around a dozen boxes. Most of my colleagues have been at this longer. Their offices (at home and work) are crammed with cardboard boxes and cabinets of well-organized notes.

I'd love a technical solution, but I haven't found anything that works for me.

Much like to-do lists, it's easy to just keep adding items and categorizing them in separate lists and setting dates and reminders and being sent an SMS... Or you could just put the item on your calendar and do it.

Getting back to your idea, I used to do exactly this with Delicious. But after so long I got tired of writing notes for everything I read; I realize now this is because I began consuming too much every day. To me, burnout seems to be the biggest problem with these types of tools. But, again, that goes back to people's habits and just "getting it done."

This is not an answer, just some thoughts (which are not entirely well-thought-out). Take them with a grain of salt.

One key advantage of this: the data is on my hard disks and it really uses Dropbox only to sync. If Dropbox ever goes out of business, I still keep the data. If I were using Delicious or whatnot, I'd have to figure out backups separately.