Here's for a Friday discussion: I really want a Journal Club functionality website. I don't think it exists. Here's what I want it to do:

• let people sign up
• mailinglist
• assign people to present papers on certain dates (automatically if they don't do it themselves)
• keep track on who presented what paper
• let people comment on/discuss the papers/presentations

Beyond this core functionality, there's of course a host of functionalities it could offer. For example, it would allow sync'ing with online calendars to notify people and prevent assignments when they are listed as busy. It could interface with all kinds of media for alerting. It may even have the option of recording and posting the JC as it happens. The website could show a list of recently covered articles among other JCs, or some similar, now widespread Web 2.0 functionality. Every user would have a profile displaying the number of papers presented, etc. so people can see if someone's good at skipping assignments. You could even track attendance, if that were necessary and all kinds of other statistics. Each year, you could crown JC king/queen! There's no limit to how useful such a site would become. Users would have regularly come back and use it, so traffic would be pretty stable, making targeted advertisement useful for the site.

I'm currently using Yahoo Groups to organize our JC. Given that there are quite a few JCs out there, why wouldn't someone be interested in starting this up? I'd be willing to pay for that service, and I'm sure other JCs would too! Maybe Mendeley would be up to it, even though it's not their core interest. It sure would help recruit users to Mendeley...