I've pasted a copy of the original email I sent to the ReadWriteWeb guy below. Inevitably some of the interesting stuff was edited out in the article: <quote>

I've pasted a copy of the original email I sent to the ReadWriteWeb guy below. Inevitably some of the interesting stuff was edited out in the article: <quote> In a nutshell, FluidDB is an openly writable hosted service for storing, sharing, searching and annotating data. While this is an accurate description it doesn't tell the whole story (in the same way as describing Twitter as, "writing messages to friends in only 140 characters or less" doesn't tell the whole story). Perhaps the best thing to do is take a look at a recent (short) presentation I did that attempts to answer exactly the questions you're asking (what is FluidDB?, how does it work?, what's different about it? etc...). The slides and notes are on Slideshare here: http://www.slideshare.net/ntoll/fluiddb-in-a-nutshell-6289580 http://www.slideshare.net/ntoll/fluiddb-in-a-nutshell-628958... With regard to Google's DataWiki, the obvious similarity appears to be that both accept contributions from everyone (i.e. they're openly writeable). However, I've just had a look around their site and it appears that it's quite a different project to FluidDB in several important ways. If I understand things correctly, each page in the DataWiki represents a discrete dataset conforming to a pre-defined structure/schema (in FluidDB we don't impose schema on our users and individual things are represented by objects rather than entries on a list). In addition, there doesn't seem to be any way to validate the trustworthiness or source of the data (in FluidDB the permission system makes sure there is control over who uses specific tags and namespaces - for example only I can add data using tags under the "ntoll" namespace). Also, DataWiki's search seems to be on a per-page basis rather than across all datasets (in FluidDB it is possible to search for and retrieve anything using any tag for which you have a "read" permission - including tags created by others). Finally, the DataWiki site says they're a wiki for structured data. FluidDB is more forgiving about the structure of data - in fact one of its strengths is how easy it is for the structure of data to evolve and change to reflect changes in the "real" world. </quote>