There has been alot of talk about the announcement by Google and ESRI at the Where 2.0 conference. The opening up of the Geo Search API by Google is definitely a step forward. ArcServer has had the ability to create generic KML documents from existing services for a while so making the service indexable and findable is a nice incremental step.

But GeoNetwork from FAO, as a metadata harvesting tool has supported all these things for some time. It has native support for Open Search, direct-to-KML services and a built in rating system for metadata. The further integration of the Open Geo stack, which is on-going should close the gap between finding and getting at good geodata.

As a side note I'll point out that many present in the room at Where had no idea who Jack Dangermond is.