(http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/2009/01/02/libraries-and-the-commons/)

and suspect her natural cynicism (!) may have nailed some of the reasons, beyond just the credit crunch…

“… Google turned off its sneakernet mass-data service, before really even turning it on. I have no inside intel on why this happened, but I do have two strong suspicions: one, uptake was
minimal (which any card-carrying repo-rat could have told Google would happen, but oh well), and two, the sad few contributed datasets werent anything that would set the world on fire, especially given a critical lack of assessment or metadata or organization or anything else that would make the data worth keeping.”

It would be nice to know more of the inside story here…

[comment from posting originally to digital-preservation email list]