Hey! That's me &co., yay. Our goal is to build the best free repository of data on the web, like a 'flickr for datasets' or the almanac to wikipedia's encyclopedia. There's some similar, excellent work being done by numbrary.com, swivel.com and Freebase, and we intend to complement those projects (as well as to fuel and inspire the projects you all are building). The difference between infochimps and those sites is we're 'messy' -- we'll take the data as it stands, and we'll give it to you with no restrictions and no sandbox, to play with on your machine with your tools. As people find various datasets interesting or useful and thus choose to enhance them (better formats, more metadata), we'll make it easy to share those contributions back.

If you're excited about this project and want to help it grow, please (http://help.infochimps.org/help/show/Contact) contact us. The site's still in rough shape, but there's a lot there to love. You can also follow along with the development at our blog -- http://blog.infochimps.org/