Most people these days post to the arxiv before they even send their paper to a journal, and some have stopped submitting to journals altogether. (I wish they all would, it would cut down on that annoying refereeing we all have to do.) And nobody actually reads the journals — they serve exclusively as ways to verify that your work has passed peer review.Now that would be a neat model to adopt.
p.s I personally am not that enamored of trackbacks. Blogger doesn't support them, trackback spam is rampant, and they can be cumbersome to use. Technorati "who links to me" pages are often more effective. But they do provide a (semi-)automatic comment mechanism that allows for discussions of papers to be carried out in the blogosphere, so it will be interesting to see how effective this is.