First Look at Next.Data.gov
whitehouse.gov
whitehouse.gov
For example, the French government's open-data portal [1] has a pleasant interface and a nice search, but much of the data itself is miscellaneous files they've received from different departments or cities, not normalized into any kind of standard format. I can grudging overlook a lot of it being in Excel rather than some more portable data format like CSV, but much of it is even inside PDFs rather than available in a tabular format.
You are given absolutely no idea what order stuff is presented in. Even if they are in some kind of order the 'double sized' ones will throw you off. There's no way to browse or sort by things like date.
Tiles are okish for ethereal content (although personally I hate ethereal content too), but something like a database of datasets should have more structure to it. I'm not trying to 'discover' what data exists, I will likely have something specific I wish to look up.
Cant they just stick to a standard list?
Or why not take a page from file managers and let you choose the layout.
Given they're already doing the inverse, I guess this is the next logical step.
You will notice similarities in "technology stack[s]" for open data initiatives. This is great, as it promotes code reuse. Further, we utilize popular open source projects like CKAN and Wordpress so that fixes benefit a much larger community and so that more developers are familiar with the underlying technology, hopefully making it easier to contribute to open data initiatives.