Alex Little

Seeing myself getting completely locked into using Google products, I thought it might be an interesting experiment to try not to use any Google services for a month. [I'm also still a little annoyed with them for not sorting out the problem I still have with Google Groups].

Perhaps I’ll find some other interesting tools and services, or maybe not, but at least it will push me to explore and look for them, rather than going into default ‘use Google’ mode.

The main Google services I use are search (obviously), mail, reader and alerts. A while ago I was also using docs, but stopped doing so once I’d been in Ethiopia and couldn’t rely on an internet connection. So what are going to be my alternatives?

Search
Not a huge choice here, but then I don’t tend to do very sophisticated searches. Going to give Bing a try, and maybe Wolfram.

I did question whether or not I should exclude myself from using Google for search, after all, then where do I stop – not using YouTube? But I decided it would be good to force myself to try out some other search engines.

GMail
Although I read my mail through my GMail account, it’s usually a forwarded copy from my own domain. I could, with minimal effort switch to the Squirrelmail or Horde mail interfaces provided by my hosting provider. This will work fine in the UK, but back at Mekelle Uni, these interfaces run off non-standard ports, which are blocked by the Uni proxy. So, I’ve installed RoundCube to use instead. It has quite a basic interface like SquirrelMail, but has some Ajax features such as drag and drop. I don’t think I’ll miss GMail labels, but it’ll take some getting use to not having the conversation style layout of messages, to which I’ve now become accustomed.

Google Reader
Again, this wasn’t a huge deal to switch from. I installed Tiny Tiny RSS on my domain and imported the OPML from Google Reader. The functionality is very similar to Google Reader, but it has the advantage that I can choose to cache images from feeds. It may not sound like a huge deal, but it will mean when I’m in Ethiopia that I’ll be able to view the photos and other images from blogspot feeds, which are otherwise blocked in Ethiopia.

Google Alerts
This was the only service where I failed to find an equivalent. There are other alert services (alerts.com, Yahoo alerts and more) but these seem very restrictive and targeted at people wanting updates on news, sports, stocks etc. rather than general web and blog alerts. So, for now, I’ve kept my Google Alerts in place, but I’m very willing to try out other alerting services if anyone can point me in the right direction.

I like the idea of being more in control of the tools and services I’m using, despite the fact that I need to be more self-reliant for backups etc. Having my own domain (and associated email), made it relatively easy to install and run roughly equivalent services without huge upheaval.

Will the reduced (or just changed?) functionality and usability make me miss Google too much? I’ll find out in the next month, or maybe just the next couple of days.

Ever since I arrived in Ethiopia, access to Blogger has been completely blocked across the country. This was quite a pain for anyone wanting follow Blogger blogs – they could be accessed via online RSS readers – but then you still missed out on any images. It was also a problem for those VSO volunteers who had set up blogs before they came to Ethiopia then found they couldn’t update them easily (or at all!).

The good news is that today I’ve found I can now access Blogger directly! So for some reason ETC (telecoms co) or Ethiopian government must have decided it was no longer a threat.

The bad news (from Bloomberg) is that it seems unlikely the ETC monopoly on telecoms will be relaxed – meaning ongoing outrageous costs for mobile SIMs and broadband internet connections. To quote from their article (note that is the correct number of zeros in the 1Mb broadband monthly cost):

Girma Birru, Ethiopia’s trade minister, said Ethiopia has no plans to liberalize the telecommunications and financial-services industries to gain access to World Trade Organization (WTO), Bloomberg news reported.

“Primarily we will join the WTO not to make others happy, but to make our economy work,” Birru said. “So to the extent it helps our economy we will liberalize things, but if it’s not going to assist our goals in trade and development we will not liberalize. Why do we have to?”

“I don’t see any plan” to break up or sell Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp. to private investors, Birru said. “If there are some problems it has nothing to do with ownership. It has only to do with management. Management and ownership don’t necessarily go together.”

According to Bloomberg news, Ethiopian Telecommunication charges $35 for a mobile-phone SIM card, where in neighboring Somalia and Kenya it costs less than $5. A 1-megabyte per second Internet connection costs more than $2,000 a month in Ethiopia. In South Africa, the continent’s biggest economy, a similar service costs between 600 rand ($59) and 760 rand, according to the http://www.mybroadband.co.za Web site.

Newai Gebre-Ab, chief economic advisor to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, said “the company [ETC] is “generating a lot of money and that money is being put to good use for development of infrastructure,”.

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that I’ve added a ‘VSO feeds’ section to the side bar. I wanted to be able to aggregate feeds from other VSO volunteers to show on my site, unfortunately the RSS widget built into WordPress won’t aggregate feeds for you – you’d need to create a new wdiget for each feed – not really what I wanted.

However, I did find the SimplePie Plugin for WordPress which has done exactly what I needed and was very straightforward to get up and running. The display is all done via templates and is very configurable. The only (very small) niggle that I have is that you need to specify the feed urls in the code, rather than in the WordPress admin pages, e.g.

<?php
echo @SimplePieWP(array(
     'http://markvso.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default',
     'http://siddypen.wordpress.com/feed',

http://nonoincambodia.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default'

      ), array(
     'items' => 10,
     'date_format' => 'j M Y',
     'truncate_item_description' => 100
  ));
?>

At the moment I’m only showing feeds from 3 blogs, but if you have a feed that you’d like me to add then please send it on.

Rather unfortunately the blogging system that VSO uses (http://www.vso-stories.net/) doesn’t provide RSS feeds of the postings (!) – though it does provide an email subscription service. So there are several other blogs I’d like to include in my aggregator which would be very relevant, e.g. Julian Bass’s blog, but I can’t until vso-stories provides an RSS feed factility

Just been having a tidy up of my RSS feeds – I had some in Google Reader and some in Netvibes and some bookmarked in FireFox, which all seemed a bit daft, so I’ve moved them all to Google Reader. This now means that the only thing I’ve got left on my Netvibes page is the GMail widget and my MSG widget – which now makes my Netvibes page redundant, I’m usually logged in to MSG via MSGAlert seperately anyway, so that basically leaves GMail – and if that’s all that’s left, I’d just go straight to GMail.

Not really sure what I think about that – maybe it’s just the way I’ve been using Netvibes and the widgets I’ve been adding…

Yesterday Chris installed an RSS feed bot on our msg.open.ac.uk server, so now we can subscribe ourselves to and RSS feeds and receive an instant message whenever they are updated – seem pretty good so far – will save me having to trawl through the list of blogs I’ve got on my netvibes page looking for what’s been updated!

So now thinking about whether this bot should be installed and run on the OpenLearn MSG server – as it could be something that’s really handy for people to have – and may increase take up of MSG – and especially MSG Alert.