Google

Google (external link) is not a project for creating "free content" or any of the other things that this wiki is supposed to be about.

However, if you read their documentation, they do seem to have some high-minded ideals, e.g. their core goal of "making the world's information universally accessible and useful" – whatever that means! Here's what they say about how their mission relates to one of their products, Gmail:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. We know that more and more of the information that's important to people is being exchanged and kept in email and chats. It can be overwhelming to keep track of this information, or to find later. We believe we can help with that.

This relates tangentially to commons-based peer production. (In a way, Google's PageRank technology simply exploits existing CBPP).

At any rate, Google is mentioned all over the wiki, and at least for the past year or two, when I describe the things I do to casual passers by (e.g. my family) they say, why don't you get a job at Google? (After hearing this advice enough times, I actually sent a letter of interest to a few Google types, but never heard back.)

What does Google do that's relevant to what we're doing? Perhaps we can start to answer that question here, as the core part of a general open-minded critique.

One thing they did was answer questions. I even went so far as to call them the web's ultimate answering machine once upon a time, in a fit of Adamsesque good humor.

But they don't do that anymore. (I feel privilaged to be the one bringing that interesting recent news to the Asteroid.)

Here is an article describing the experience one person had working for Google Answers (back in the day). (Short epilogue here.)

--jcorneli