News.com has an interview with the co-founder of Pyra Labs (which created Blogger.com), and which has acquired by Google. Some excerpts:
Over the last four years, since we started Blogger, there’s been a tremendous amount of development on the publishing side. There’s not been as much progress on the reading and finding-stuff side. That’s Google’s forte. That’s where we see we can add value to the Web log world–helping people find good stuff–hopefully with Google’s technology…One sort of high-level way to look at that is that blogging is a way to collect stuff and comment on it as you’re navigating the Web; search is a way to find stuff.
Photos are a very big thing. Using digital cameras will become a core way people publish in general–you can now actually post to Blogger through your camera phone. And with various devices coming out with more and more wireless access, we think mobility will be a big part of the blogging–making notes or recordings from wherever you are…There’s a lot of stuff going on in terms of trying to better define the networks. A key element of Web blogs is the community element. Most blogs are not self-contained; they are highly dependent on linking to each other. That’s been a fairly manual progress. There’s a lot of effort going on to map who’s linking to each other and to define the circles of influence.
