Today's Links of Interest

A random collection of links:

Alleged Rape Victim Snaps at Defense Attorney, Tossed in Jail for Contempt in Cell Next To Accused Attacker

Why Use Google Groups

Google Groups Is Dead

Cracked

100 Extensive Libraries from Around the World that Anyone Can Access

This last from mary & mac design, whose tagline is "know what's inside the box before you look outside," a sentiment I certainly appreciate.

Update on Going Without Google

In last Saturday's post on escaping Google I listed alternatives recommended by others.

I gave DuckDuckGo a try this past week, but it simply didn't turn up the quality of results Google does. I have since switched to Yahoo! for searching, and its results seem equal to Google's.

I have also been looking at Zoho to replace things like Gmail and Google Docs. Zoho really offers quite a bit of useful stuff. I suspect the usefulness of Zoho as a collaboration tool would depend on getting others to use it as well; most people already have a Gmail account, so it's simpler to just use Google's services.

Escaping Google

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. -- Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Here are two very good articles on escaping the ubiquity of Google online. Of course, it's not entirely possible, but there are a lot of alternatives out there for Google functions.

How I Learned to Live Google Free, by Joshua J. Romero

A Week Without Google, by Chris Reynolds

Some of the replacements that interested me were:

• for RSS, Sage extension for Firefox
• instead of Gmail, Zoho Mail (though Romero notes that, for better security, Lavabit or FastMail might be better, and each has a plan for less than $10 a year)
• for searching, DuckDuckGo seems even better than Google and doesn't save or pass on data about you or your search; Blekko also seems to have some useful functions
• YouTube seems to be the indispensable Google site, though Vimeo is an alternative
• Todoist replaces Google Tasks, and Romero notes it is by far superior

I will update this post with more alternatives to Google in the near future.

Update: Speaking of the near future ...

• Lightning, a Thunderbird plug-in, replaces Google Calendar and Tasks
• Hootsuite replaces Twitter
• Chris Pederick's Web Developer replaces Chrome's WebKit (though Reynolds laments the lack of Inspect Element, some similar add-ons are available for Firefox)

There's a lot more; the above is only the beginning.

Here are two more guys who took up the week-without-Google challenge:

A Week Without Google! on Tech Guru

One Week Without Google, by Tom Krazit

The Tech Guru's article offers some more alternatives:

• He suggests Yahoo! search for web searching.
• Instead of Gmail, he too recommends Zoho, and as an alternative, in.com.
• He claims Zoho is better than Google Docs, but also suggests Thinkfree, which offers (like Zoho) an online office suite.
• For Google Maps, he suggests Microsoft's Virtual Earth (though this doesn't seem, at first glance, to lead to an easy-to-use map application - maybe this has become Bing Maps?) and Yahoo Maps, and also Ask Maps. For Google Earth, Microsoft has Virtual Earth 3D, though this seems to have been dropped.
• For YouTube, he offers Yahoo Video, Metacafe, Vimeo, Revver, Blip.tv and Veoh.

A few more apps of interest that I ran across in the above articles and in research stemming from them:

• Web Developer does seem cool.
• SeaMonkey is an integrated Mozilla app with browser, email, HTML composer, and more.
• Tabberwocky seems like an interesting Firefox tab manager.