Chris Patil and Vivian Siegel wrote the first part of their thoughts on this problem, in Drinking from the firehose of scientific publishing:
The fundamental question is this: can the wisdom of crowds be exploited to post-filter the literature?
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A lioness doesn't bother eating individual blades of grass - she lets the antelopes do that drudgery, and then she eats the antelopes. It is similarly tempting to assign the post-filtering task to hordes of enthusiastic volunteers - intrepid, pajama-clad souls, armed only with keyboards and search engines, who would wade through the jungle of the literature and return to us only the choicest prizes. But this is a fantasy. For bloggers to provide an efficient and efficacious post-filter service, they would have to meet an imposing list of qualifications: sufficiently well-trained to make wise judgments about the papers most worthy of attention; sufficiently idle to have nothing better to do than read papers all day; free of idiosyncrasy or agenda that might bias their choices; and willing to work continuously for free. (In other words, there won't be 'hordes'.) Add to that the need for competition between bloggers -comparative prestige being the coin of that murky realm - and soon we'll find ourselves combing through myriad blogs in order to make sure we're reading the best one. And then we'll write a column about the need to post-filter the blogosphere.
Chris, on his blog, adds:
Obviously I wouldn't blog if I thought it were totally pointless, but I have come to believe that even the most well-intentioned scientific bloggers are probably not going to be able to revolutionize their colleagues' relationship with the literature. In part, as we say in the excerpted passage, this is because it's unlikely that a single individual will rarely have both the relevant expertise and the required amount of free time. But are also other reasons, the most important one being that "one size does not fit all", e.g., any given blogger's survey of the recent literature involves judgment calls about what is interesting and important, which may or may not correspond with the judgments that would be made by any given individual reader.
Literature? Who needs literature? kidding
It's all going to go right to the databases. So much of the high volume science can't even begin to be captured by traditional publishing.
I was reading a "big" paper in Science recently, and went right to the supplemental data to look up some things. Even the 60 page supplement couldn't begin to get at what I needed.
It was well documented here: http://scienceblogs.com/geneticfuture/2008/09/oh_shit_thats_320_terabyt… but I have also heard about this from other sources--the volumes and the challenges for even the databases/software providers.
It will depend on the level of resolution of the type of data you are interested in, I think.
Apparently, Patil and Siegel have not yet encountered the Force of Nature that is Coturnix.
Perhaps we should be shifting our focus to adequately filtering out useless information FOR others, to make it easier/quicker/neater for them to understand, and start helping others learn how to filter for themselves all information they come across.
Critical thinking is the key.
I've actually found several papers relevant to my research because they were blogged about or somebody in the Pharyngula comment threads mentioned them. . . so yeah.