I can see the potential benefits of using SideWiki. As Clay Shirky said, "Every webpage is a latent community".
As far as robbing bloggers of their comment space, Google Notes can do that. Facebook does that. FriendFeed does it, etc. It's not new, and I'm not sure that it's evil. Moving power to the edge isn't just about moving it to the authorspace, be it the New York Times, or BuzzMachine. In my case, it's about moving the power to me as a commenter. And I'm just as much on the edge as the Author.
If nobody whips up a integrated comment system for WordPress and Blogger that uses SideWiki as the engine, I'll be surprised.
A quick search through the API looks like there's no way to use the API to insert comments yet, which could be a roadblock. And the fact that comments are voted up instead of threaded pretty much kills it as a discussion space.
However, I'm cautiously excited about what this may evolve into.
We should remind ourselves that, this Memorial Day weekend and the weeks that follow, we are subjects in a grand experiment to see how good we are at social distancing as stay-at-home orders are being slowly lifted. The state's stay-at-home order was never meant to keep you, individually, safe from infection. It was meant to keep hospital's safe from being overwhelmed by too many of us needing them at the same time. In Michigan, the daily new cases of COVID-19 are higher today than they were when we locked down in late March. We are testing whether or not we can open up (with all of our new precautions and protocols) without spiking the rate of spread, but make no mistake: it *is* an experiment, and we *are* the test subjects. Please don't get careless as things start to open up. We need to get our economies back on track, but we are still a long way (and a vaccine away) from being out of the woods. Stay vigilant, folks. Wash your hands. Wear a mask. As has always been the...