I think this post misses a number of things. For example, take peer review. The system is not perfect--but peer review takes time and expertise. It's not as

I think this post misses a number of things. For example, take peer review. The system is not perfect--but peer review takes time and expertise. It's not as simple as a "like". When I review an article--I check for consistency. If necessary, I go through the references. At times, I make sure that errors have been propagated correctly. Then, there are broader issues such as relevance. In short, it's labor intensive and sometimes there are bad referees--but overall, I think the system is better than a simple comment system. In modern terms, you might call it "curated" content--the referees and editors help increase the signal to noise ratio in the sea of papers that are submitted. For conferences--while the presentations are important, so are the conversations in the halls, at dinner, etc. It's useful to have face to face conversations with your collaborators and to make new ones. There have been some changes--like for initial program committee meetings for conferences sometimes take place using webex/gotomeeting given the diverse timezones/countries of members. Some experimentation has been done with using second life for the first stage of grant reviews--but at the end, physical meetings are necessary. For conferences themselves (in physics), you are paying on average less than $1000--even for conferences with ~10,000 people. But--conferences do cost money to organize--I made a mistake for the first workshop I organized by charging too little... Things are gradually improving--slides from the invited talks are hosted online for the major conference from my field. Mobile schedules could be improved... Others have commented on the EC2 question--but one other thing to consider is whether their architecture is suited to a given problem. We're investigating this now. While Hadoop is good for some problems, it may not be appropriate for others. This is generally true of a number of the points in the article--use the right tool for the right job--don't just use it because it is new...