Like the web itself, commercial companies will eventually come around. It can be the "new new" content marketing, since it's a small step from source-discovery to company-brand-discovery. Code becomes a proxy for author-reader connection, like prose.

We can culturally transform "view source" into a reputation metric that impacts visibility and revenue.

Look at the code snippets in the recent Bloomberg article, "What is Code", http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-cod.... Imagine a weekly NY Times list of Top 10 New Code, or Genius.com annotations, or CC-BY code comments which appear in search engine results, etc.

Society will increasingly care about coding, as writing code|prose influences thought, and more people will seek to understand the tools that make us as we make them.

Thanks for raising this important requirement.

Very interesting.

Are there any books/studies/examples of commercial companies doing something like this?

It's more of a vision than an observation :)

Web site easter eggs and job ads-in-code are a precursor, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25826678 & https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/the-5-most-creative-dev...

W3C has an Annotations Group working in this area, which includes commercial companies and educational institutions, http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/report.html