I keep coming across the idea of „research 2.0″ – research activities, process and tools seem to be changing tremendously as well and ther e seem to be links to our cop_place theme as well:
A collegue has written indepth about these changes http://www.peter.baumgartner.name/ (but in German)
http://www.webcitation.org/ seems to be make virtual places less fluid and transient so they can be cited OK (a memory / Museum for the Internet), http://www.librarything.com/seems to be social software for archiving books and sharing them alike and http://www.citeulike.org/ allows to collectively collect academic papers
so much to be explored and to assess if it is relevant to our question of new community places…