About eight months ago in this space, I was encouraged by Tony Targonski to write some predictions involving the future of blogging in 2007. In case you're not one of my three regulars, here was my original quote:

Various governments will get involved... and not in good ways.

Yes, we've had free reign for a long time. Generally, the "blogosphere" has policed itself and ridiculed the liars and frauds into nothing... unfortunately, we all know that when something is working, the government has to step in to break it:

Guaranteed: Watch for the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) to step in and look at the usage of blogs in political races and come up with rules to make our lives more difficult.

Guaranteed: Watch for the Courts and various Law Enforcement Organizations to step in and continue to fight out the definition of "journalist" and related issues.

I hate being wrong, but I have to admit that I was horribly wrong on this one.

Since 2001 or so (according to SourceForge) when I got involved in Open Source, I've joined a handful of projects and had roles varying from a general advisor/reviewer to Core Developer to Newbie Wrangler. Yes, that last one was an actual title. But the interesting thing is that I've never started an Open Source Project myself. I've worked with projects that were established, already had communities (some quite small), and already had some structure in place. Recently, a number of opportunities have come to light and one of the interesting ones - but not the most interesting one - involves preparing a small application for release as Open Source... so I find myself considering and evaluating what it would take.

First, I'm a firm believer in that it must be useful now. As great as SourceForge is, I'm not willing to add yet another project that has a grand vision that doesn't do anything. That said, it doesn't need to be perfect. I don't think the application needs to do everything and fully encompass the entire vision in the first release... but it needs to do something useful immediately.