Not next year, it's 2013
We're currently on block 136938.
Block reward halves after block 210000.
New blocks happen about once every 10 minutes.
>>> time.ctime(time.time() + (210000 - 136938)*60*10)
'Thu Dec 6 21:12:24 2012'
At that rate, we can expect the first halving in December 2012.
This makes sense because the difficulty lags behind the network speed, and so blocks have been generated a little more quickly than every 10 minutes, meaning the reward will halve to 25 BTC in a little less than 4 years from 9-Jan-2009 (the date block 1 was found).
>>> (time.time() - time.mktime((2009,1,9,02,54,25,0,0,0))) 136938 60
9.678566721912704
The average time between blocks so far has been 9.7 minutes, not 10 minutes.