According to news.com, a new blog is created every 7.4 seconds. That adds up to 12,000 new blogs a day, 275,000 posts a day and 10,800 updates an hour. Technorati, a search engine that monitors blogs, tracked more than 8 million online diaries as of March 21, 2005, up from 100,000 just two years ago.

Blogging is really catching up. Indian government is also planning to open doors to Indian bloggers.

I was wondering on how future of blogging will look like.

Blog Weblog wrote that Autoblogging will be the wave of future. According to them, some examples of autoblogging could be :
1. autoblogging by email
2. autoblogging via mobile phone
3. autoblogging in a supermarket with a PDA

A new term Moblog is emerging in blogging these days.
Recent interest in wireless blogging seems to revolve around SMS. Essentially this is e-mail blogging from a cellular phone using an SMS to E-mail gateway.
Though, Blogging using PDA is also becoming common. People have started blogging using Camera phones, and there are products to even update a blog using phones.

People are finding Audio blogging as interesting. I recently noticed a site audioblogger which seems to be an extension of Blogger and provides unlimited audio posts. Another site audblog allows bloggers to post audio to their blogs using any phone.

Talking about expressing ideas, Video blogs seems to be the next extension to audio blogging. Vidblog contains a collection of video blogs, and the number seemed fairly surprising to me. Search engine giant Google is also looking towards video blogging, they have already started accepting videos.

There are so many blogs on web that it becomes difficult to keep track of them. RSS, ATOM, RDF, OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) are few of the popular specifications of syndicating and sharing weblogs. OPML is a file format which can be used to share RSS subscriptions. It can be used in RSS aggregators like Bloglines or Akregator to import an OPML file to subscribe to all the feeds.

Lot of Companies are encouraging their employees to blog. Google was probably the first one to create a corporate blog, and now there are others including Microsoft, Macromedia, Yahoo search and Ask Jeeves.

With all these new changes taking place in blogging, it makes me think how it will look like in future. Adding few more points on what Fabrice wrote on this:

Blogging and social networking softwares will converge.

websites will become more blog like.

Corporate blogging will grow. Companies are already finding it as a way for the employees to express their thoughts and concerns.

There will be areas other than technology and politics emerging in blogs.

Based on blogger's interests, new blogging groups will start emerging.

New business models for blogging will emerge. Companies like google, yahoo, msn, bloglines are already working on providing blogging services, and it might take form of something similar to having a premium blogging account with more space and more features with some extra charges.

Apache came up with a proposal to develop a open source implementation of Java called Harmony.

Though, Harmony FAQ shows that they are going to have tough time making sure that they are not voilating Sun's license.

Talking about license, there have been lot of discussions on Sun's license earlier also. There were efforts to develop a free Java implementation including GNU classpath and Kaffe but both of these were licensed under GPL.

The special thing about Harmony is that it is going to be released under Apache's license.

Though initiative of developing a free VM raises few thoughts:

Will it always be released at the same time as a new release of Java by Sun?
I think not for now atleast. As it appears that development of Java VM is not a small task and to catch up with current state Java VM should take quite alot of time.

Can it be better than Java?
No, as a mail archieve indicates, it has to confirm to J2SE specification or it can not be called "Java".

What will be the future of Java if this really "catches" up?
There will be lot of diverse implementation of Java "like" platforms, each taking up code base of Harmony and implementing their own VM.

Surely, this puts Sun into a interesting position.
Sun has been trying to improve relationship with Open source people, inviting others to develop specification for their next java release, or contribute to it.

I personally feel development of Harmony will create more diversification of Java community.

I was impressed by the intersting user interface of Google suggest. It uses XMLHttpRequest for making callback to Google and updates the search results on every key press.

The JavaScript code within it, calls a routine callGoogle, which makes call in the following format (On typing goog in English locale): http://www.google.com/complete/search?hl=en&js=true&qu=goog. The URL returns two arrays, one with possible results and another with number of results.

This interface was developed by one of the Google’s employee in his 20% time, which is a program where Google allows their employees to devote 20% of their working hours to any project they choose.

But does this really shows the right results.

Screenshot below shows 155,000,000 results for keyword "google" in Google complete and 281,000,000 results when searching the keyword in google.com itself.