I think this new technology called Photosynth from Microsoft could be one of those things that changes to world.

It takes lots and lots (think hundreds and thousands) of digital pictures from hundreds and thousands of users and automatically stitches them together into a 3D world you can navigate. Zoom in. Zoom out. Rotate.

I can envision a site like flickr.com where as soon as you upload your pictures they automatically find their place in the virtual world and add their own bit of texture.

Imagine a big catastrophe like 9/11 or Katrina. Pictures from people's cell phones start trickling in, each with a different perspective of the same things. This could give the rest of the world a better idea of what things look like on the ground very quickly.

Watch this video and you will get a better idea.

We have a lot of pictures at work for every project we do. (Again think thousands.) We were discussing just the other day how to archive them in a way that could leverage the pictures someone else took for a previous project for a totally different and unrelated project. I had something like this in mind, but not quite as fancy or with 3D.