From the October Google Webmaster Chat Q &A:

Jane, Ireland: Does the geotargeting feature in Webmaster tools hold as much weight as having a country-specific TLD?

Kaspar aka Guglarz: Hi Jane!

Google uses a bunch of signals like location of the server or the TLD in order to determine which users might be interested in the sites content. Geotargeting is a way for webmasters who use non country specific TLD's like .net/ to tell Google which your target group was, if the site is specifically targeted to users from a particular area. Think of the site of a small, local hardware store or a vet for example. Potentially, their main target users would be people living in the nearby area. Geotargeting is not to be used for language targeting though.

From the October Google Webmaster Chat Q &A:

Anonymous: Duplicate content - How many unique URLs (domains) are permitted to point at the same destination before it becomes a problem?

e.g. domain1.com, domain2.com, domain3.com all point to domain.com, which has its own pages...

Maile Ohye: Hi there, I'm happy to help with this question, but I'm not sure how it's duplicate content. In your example it seems like domain.com is the only site hosting content. It's common for companies to buy misspelling <-- did i spell that right? of their domain and then 301 to the correct version. Can you further explain the scenario for us?

From the October Google Webmaster Chat Q &A:

Anonymous: Suppose my website supports English and French.  Should the English version of a particular page and the French version have different URLs?  Any other best practices for multi-lingual site architecture?

Matt Cutts: If you can afford it, I would do domain.com and domain.fr. If that's not possible, I would consider doing en.domain.com and fr.domain.com. If that's not possible, then domain.com/en and domain.com/fr can work. In webmaster tools, you can geographically target a site (and I believe parts of a site such as fr.domain.com), which will help as well.