Trepia provides a new smartmobbing tool: access a location-based list of other nearby WiFi users. It's not available for Mac yet: please contact Trepia to ask them to accelerate Mac development.(Via Emergent Report)

On the surface, Trepia looks similar to a buddy list. While programs like ICQ and AIM will show you a static list of friends, Trepia shows you a list of people who are currently in your area -- people who you most likely didn't know before! You can check out their profile and picture and strike up a conversation, knowing that if you actually want to meet them, they are never more than a few minutes away.

How does it work behind the scenes? If two people are within range of the same Wi-Fi access point, they must be close to each other. Building on this idea, Trepia tracks the movement of people through access points, and then notifies you of other users who are in your area. Trepia is not limited by Wi-Fi's range because it even works when two people are not on the same access point, but the access points themselves are close to each other.

Something's buzzing online about weblog APIs. Someone posted a comparison between the Blogger and the MetaWeblog API on his weblog. Then Dave Winer is getting pretty riled up about Google's plans to develop a new version of Blogger API, which should better be based on the MetaWeblog API instead.

First things first, Diego Doval is correct when he says that a weblog API should provide access to all the functionality offered by the product (be that Blogger, Radio, or MovableType). Now, clearly the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API are quite different, even though the latter is actually based on the former. Comparing the two is pointless, because that is not really the issue. Having to deal with a variety of weblog APIs is a curse on the intrinsically open nature of weblogs themselves. One of the most interesting aspects of weblogs is the ability to not only to share information relatively quickly, but to make it widely accessible (Joi's Ivan story is a great illustration). While developing Kung-Log, I stumbled across so many differences between each weblog system's implementation of whatever Weblog API they endorsed. It's even worse. Weblog systems may differ in how they implement, for example, the Blogger API. pMachine's version of the Blogger API is, to phrase it mildly, ridiculous and clumsy. Only one weblog system has provided a nearly all-functional, self-explanatory, and straightforward implementation of a weblog API (there's a hint of subjectivity here, but still, the point remains). MovableType not only implements both the Blogger and the MetaWeblog, it provides a variety of extra API routines, that make client access to MovableType weblogs incredibly easy. An illustrative example is the getTrackbackPings method, which can be used to retrieve the list of TrackBack pings posted to a particular entry...

This article from SPACE.com about the Interplanetary Internet (IPN) is not science fiction. Rich Gray reports it is becoming a reality.

The IPN would form a backbone connecting a series of hubs on or around planets, ships, and at other points in space. These hubs would provide high-capacity, high-availability Internet traffic over distances that could stretch up to hundreds of millions of miles.

Gray adds that all the planets and satellites in our solar system have already Internet addresses and that NASA is already communicating with its earth-orbiting missions through its internal Deep Space Network. The rest of us will have to wait until at least 2005 when IPN-equipped satellites are launched

Check this column for more details.