IP Address Lookup

You can easily get the geographical location for an IP address at http://www.ip-adress.com . It even displays a nice little map, though you shouldn't expect it to be accurate enough to go on a hunt for a hacker with your GPS tracker ;-)

Mini-blog comment replies

A lot of people these days write short tit-bits on social networking sites instead of paragraphs and journals of hand-written notes. I think it's an evolution of the Orkut scrapbook and the Facebook wall - you would now post messages to your own scrapbook/wall and people following your mini-blog get notified, often via a free SMS text message.

When you let visitors add comments to your posts, you would reply back to their comment and there's no way for them to know that you've replied to their comment. Blogger.com addresses that by emailing you all comments after yours (or at least that's what I think it does) if you check a little box when posting a comment.

Some systems are smarter and maintain a tree-like structure to keep track of which post is a reply to which other post, but then it all depends on how the designers intended it to be. Being an architect myself, I have to make trade-offs between cost and functionality and, in the end, the more you spend, the better stuff you can come up with.

Group chat coming soon in GoogleTalk

Google has a GoogleTalk gadget web client accessible from it's website at http://www.google.com/talk . It features Group chat but the downside is that it doesn't receive offline messages. As a friend from the old country would say, you've got to pick what suits the moment.

If it's any indicate of what's to come, we should see Group Chat in the GoogleTalk client sometime soon.

RSS vs Atom

RSS and Atom are both used to publish news feeds (summarized content used by readers to track content changes). Both are quite popular, although RSS has received more attention than Atom. RSS is a specification by the Harvard University, whereas Atom is an RFC by the IETF and IESG.

I read a pretty interesting comparison of the two at:
http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared