Stefan Geens at Ogle Earth ponders the deeper meaning of Google's new 3D Warehouse. An excerpt:
But 3D Warehouse is not a unique product. Rather, it is the latest member in a special class of Google tools, whose other members include Google Earth Community, Google Base and Google Video. Emphatically not in this class are Google Search, Images, Desktop and Book Search, for example.
What's the difference? The first class contains tools for letting humans preëmptively attach meaning to new content being added to the web. The second class consists of machine tools for trying to divine such meaning ex post. Clearly, the first kind of tool is easier to build, and more accurate too. Google rightly prefers that new content join the web fully formed semantically, as it were.