Interesting to see that John Naugton was talking about open data and "cultural agoraphobia" in The Observer this weekend..

Talis, where I work, has just announced its Talis Connected Commons, which offers free storage of semantic data sets to anyone - as long as the data is open. Peter Murray-Rust, who is quoted in the Observer article,  is one of the people who will hopefully be making use of the Talis triple store.

And I've just been listening to Paul Miller's recent podcast with Reuven Cohen about the Open Cloud Manifesto, which tries to create a coherent idea of what an "open cloud" might be (although that seems to be more concerned with interoperability and portability, rather than openness of data). That seems to have caused some controversy along the way, even making it into The Economist.  

It certainly feels like there's a tipping point approaching for the next version of data on the web, but (as usual) the barriers are more cultural than technical.