hello, I’d like to repoen (or join in) a known discussion 
to my point of view one of the biggest difference between blender and the other well known 3d suites is that blender comes naked, with no objects/armature/mat collections available. and I’m tired by 3ds max users bad faith 
I’m dreaming of an online object library, available right from the blender interface. for sure this is not a very new idea, I tested nice scripts about it for 2.4x, that manged local libraries.
I don’t know if there’s an opened project for 2.5 about it, and if yes I’d like to join in or contribute (programming, concept, hosting…). and maybe I posted twice about it sorry… can’t find it anymore 
object categorization, tagging, description etc… can be handled by a big xml file, downloaded or partially downloaded from a reference blender site, then interpreted in the blender ui as an object tree diagram. that file would be regularly updated with the new object given by the community.
decentralized repository : bittorrent could be used to lower the need for server disk space and long term, thankless webmanagement jobs. only the object pictures and tags would be available on the website, from a browser or from blender.
OneSwarm is a kind of torrent app where you can manage a community of peer to peer users, that could be quite useful for this purpose. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneSwarm
local repository : I made some reliable and convincing tests about it, using an xml file located in several ‘object’ blender files, in a ‘library’ folder that contains several subfolders, that contains different and categorized groups of objects.
blender reads each xml file then build a tree of available things (mats, objects, tex…) that is browsable in the ui. so it’s not a ‘file based’ object appending but an ‘object/tag based’ one. if the .blend file or the object and its xml description are moved in another place, it won’t change anything for the library system.
atm the code is blended into a 2.49 script, blended cities, but I could split it and adapt it to 2.5.
I don’t know, what do you think ?