Alcohol Without Liquid??

Check out the new technology Alcohol Without Liquid designed to allow users to inhale instead of drink their alcohol. Sounds pretty crazy, but it's supposedly hangover free. Part of the hangover free aspect may be the fact that it takes considerably longer to absorb the liquor. The website suggests that it takes about 20 minutes to inhale the equivalent of 1/2 a shot of alcohol...at that pace, you need to spend hours on the machine to get the same impact of 3 or 4 regular drinks. Plus, for $299 it may be a bit pricey for the mainstream drinkers. Regardless, interesting concept.

Google Maps

I know I've written about Google Maps before, but if you haven't used it yet, you really should. It's by far the most user friendly GUI interface I've seen for directions. It's very easy to use and even offers satellite imagery of the actual streets. Put in you address and zoom in. The detail is simply amazing.

Google Maps and craigslist Combine

Google's new map service (which is cool in it's own right) has joined forces with craigslist (Listings) to show properties for rent/sale by location. Craigslist is limited to only selected cities, but the idea and user interface is still very cool.

Google Q&A

Google recently announced a new question answering service. There's lots of other search engines that offer similar functionality (Ask Jeeves for one), but they typically just show links to sites with potential answers. In contrast, google actually shows the answer itself with a link to websites that could provide additional information. According to an InfoWorld article:

Google feeds this service with information from Web sites it considers reliable, but it hasn't established formal relationships with any content provider whose information is being used for this feature, Norvig said. Google doesn't expect that the owners of the Web sites will complain over the possibility that this new service will steal traffic away from them, Norvig said. On the contrary, being featured at the top of Google's results list will give these Web sites great exposure, and will likely result in increased traffic, he said.

Seems to me that Google is dangerously close to some very serious content ownership issues. Based on the InfoWorld explanation, it sounds as if Google is taking proprietary, unauthorized, content from "reliable" sources and publishing it on its website in answer to users questions. While this probably isn't an issue for most fact based questions (e.g., what's the capital of California?), who determines what the cut-off is?