What do you do with data?

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The Wall Street Journal published a blog post today in which it decided, pretty much anyway, to class data as a countable noun which goes with a singular verb‏‎ much like information. But what do you do with a word like data?

For the WSJ this is good English:

the data is collected

However, many traditionalists contend that data is in fact the Latin plural of the singular, datum and therefore we should be saying:

the data are collected

This may be the case but data is no longer a Latin word (or rather, it is now an English‏‎ word of Latin origin) and it has to conform to English grammar‏‎ rules. Practically speaking, can we look at a collection of data and count them? In my opinion we can't. I am all in favour of descriptive grammar so I am sticking with data is and wait for the demise of data are which has always sounded a bit stiff and pompous to me.