Is there a service (crowdsourced or otherwise) that will let you know when the Google car is in town... GoogleCarSpotting.com or something.

I can't find the Google Car Spotting site.

But I did find this article where Google Street View caught a thief mid-stealing:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20022122-71.html

Nice ...Google Street View, I suspect might need to take on a life of its own - here's an interesting post: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/rTlFuf1xPj4 "I think that Google should update the picture every time someone moves into a house, because the old people stuff would not be there and it would not be embarrassing to look at your house on Google.".

In my semantic web of things... a roving Google Car turns atoms into bits which is always quite useful for a computer scientist. So if Google was just to deploy a vast fleet of self-driving vehicles (they don't need to be Lexus's anymore, they could be sort of bot-cars with only the vital bits) to just drive around scanning things (and people), then it would be a great resource for the world's realtors - and a load of other people (there are Mechanical Turk jobs out there asking for people to go take photos of buildings - assume this is a verification thing, but if the Google Ref is a good authentication, then that might be super useful.

Google definitely wants that world. It just will take time to get there.