On the road to Bandol

I just read a nice interview of the founder of the Data Liberation Front, an initiative that at least not everything is evil at Google. The interview is quite nice, as it goes through the motivations behind the creation of the site.

However, throughout the interview, the focus seems to be more on the promotion of Google products and initiative than on the promotion of open standards. Not that the problem of standardizing formats is easy. Even specialized sites like Plaxo have problems keeping up with the zillions of optional fields and conflicting representations of data in our standard address books. So, can we expect something to happen globally on lesser-user data formats (say, a cellar’s wine list)? Well, not unless somebody like Google really invests in the thing, and gets other big guys to move.

Let’s hope that this is a good start.