Wouldn’t you like to have Google at your fingertips wherever you go? Wouldn’t it be even cooler if you had a friend standing by to search Google for you, so that you don’t have to spend the time typing on the go? What if it was a complete stranger working for pennies on behalf of a very cool service named ChaCha?

Here’s what you do: Dial 1-800-2CHACHA (or 1-800-224-2242, if you prefer). A friendly automaton will prompt you to ask a question. Ask away, and then resume your daily business. In a minute or two, you’ll get an SMS message with an answer to your question. Pretty darn slick.

There are a few GotChas with ChaCha: Real humans are finding your answers, and they’re paid for their answers in dimes. (But they make it up in volume, I imagine) So don’t expect the sort of service you’d get from a skilled reference librarian with lots of answers at their disposal. Instead you’ll get a reasonably skilled Google/Wikipedia searcher who will be about as accurate as the same sources.

So it’s great for “I’m at this intersection and I want to find a gas station, where’s the closest one?” or “Who played Iron Man in the movie of the same name?” Not so good for “Where did I put my keys?”

Good stuff. I could easily become addicted to this service.

I just learned about Scribd - Home, a new service that serves up user-generated eBooks and other text-filled content. You can read the shared documents online, or download them in Word, Text, PDF or even MP3 (using pretty decent text-to-speech software).

The bar to self publish just became quite low indeed.

I know Google. I’m a close personal friend of Google. And Yahoo, you’re no Google.

Yahoo Pipes arrived last night to some geeky fanfare, and promptly got overloaded and crashed. Then they bulked up capacity and it came back up, and then it crashed again.

It’s a strange little program. It lets you take XML feeds from any number of sources and do… thing to them. Like concatenate them, filter them, or pipe the results through something else.

So, for example, you could take the URLs of everyone who commented on your blog, grab the RSS feeds from their blog, and put all the posts together into a single mega RSS feed. Or you could take apartment listings off CraigsList and search for crime reports for those streets, and pipe the search results into, again, an RSS feed.

Today’s pick isn’t Mac-specific software, but rather a web based goodie from Google. You see, Google just updated Google Reader, their web-based RSS reader.

First, let me just say that I am a firm devotee of online RSS readers. I have a license to NetNewsWire, and I love it. It’s a great program. However, when I’m not at a Mac or not at my computer at all, it’s useless to me. Furthermore, online readers (if they’re good) fit seamlessly into my browsing experience. It’s all in one application, and serves as a launchpad for all my daily reading.

Fark’s Drew Curtis doesn’t pull his punches as he takes on traditional media’s advertising model, web-based empire building, and pornography. You may not agree with him, but it’s well worth reading what he has to say. (From Ideagrove.com)