John Battelle provides good, brief analysis of what Google is up to.
With the news that Google has locked down googlereviews.com, incorporated reviews (of sorts) into Froogle, re-launched Google Groups in a bid to get competitive with Yahoo, started to update Blogger, has released desktop search (with its obvious developer platform implications), and is quickly scaling Local with mobile and the like, it's a pretty obvious conclusion to draw: Google is joining the architecture of participation party in a big way.
