Online services Email


When it was launched in 2004 as an invitation-only No


ly service, a Gmail address had an air of exclusivity. No


longer: it now has more than 900 million users worldldwide. It’s a reliable, free webmail service, although some find the way it groups threads of emails together can be irritating. As with other Google products, the contents of your emails are used to decide what adverts to show you.


ide. It There are plenty of other free email services, such as


Outlook.com (Microsoft’s, previously called Hotmail) and Yahoo, and many internet service providers include one in the price. For a superior service Norwegian firm Runbox is worth considering. Its email service is advert free, it provides strong security and will not disclose your data without a Norwegian court order and its data centre runs on hydroelectricity. Aside from its values, the firm is focused on email and


Mapping As befits a service designed by a Californian company, Google Maps look as if it was designed mainly to show freeways. An urban streetscape is rendered in five shades of beige, while rural areas can be nearly blank. If you use it on your site, it also acts as an advert for Google. The colourful free-to-use maps built by UK


provides excellent customer service – when I enquired about how I could reduce spam, I received practical advice from one of the co-owners. Runbox’s cheapest service costs €15 a year, with the €30 package allowing you to receive and send email from up to five of your own web domains, and it offers a month’s free trial. https://runbox.com/


Blogging WordPress is used for blogging by the New York Times, Le Monde and Frankfurter Allgemeine, and has far more options than Google’s equivalent service Blogger, partly through a wide range of third-party plug-ins. There are two ways to get a WordPress site, the


easier being through Wordpress.com, run by US company Automattic. This has paid-for options or a free version if you’re happy with using an address that ends with wordpress.com. The other way is to use WordPress’ free open- source software on your own webspace, with some web-hosting firms providing easy-to-activate WordPress installations. https://wordpress.com/ https://wordpress.org/


What Google does well


There are some things that only Google can do. This includes searching in books (https://books.google.co.uk/). The hundreds of thousands of books Google scanned at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library (all out of copyright) can also be download from the Bodleian’s catalogue as pdfs (http://www. bodleian.ox.ac.uk/dbooks).


For exploring streets there is


nothing to compare to Google Street View, as no other company is likely to drive camera cars around so many of the world’s roads (www.google.co.uk/ streetview). For a rough idea of what something means in 90 languages, no other tool has the range of Google Translate (https:// translate.google.com/).


not-for-profit OpenStreetMap Foundation are a great alternative. They have Creative Commons status similar to Wikipedia, meaning they can be used for anything as long as you credit them as “©OpenStreetMap contributors”. After finding the area you want, either take a screenshot or download a high-resolution image by clicking on the Share icon (a square with an arrow curving off to the right) on the right-hand side of the map. For interactive maps, US firm Mapbox combines OpenStreetMap’s data with the ability to change all the design options: the Financial Times has used this to build its fonts and pink colour scheme into its maps. Mapbox is also better than Google for building maps with markers, and offers a wide choice of designs. You will need an account, but it is free up to 50,000 map views a month. For Great Britain, Ordnance Survey provides free-to- use online mapping services including its OpenSpace web map builder. This makes it straightforward to use Ordnance Survey’s beautifully designed mapping in a website by generating the HTML code for you. You will need to set up a free account to make this work. http://www.openstreetmap.org https://www.mapbox.com


https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ innovate/innovate-with-open-space. html


/


Other Google services have


competitors, but remain hard to beat. Google Drive (https://drive. google.com/), which includes an equivalent of Microsoft Office. It has rivals including Zoho Docs (https:// www.zoho.com/docs/) but, if you want to share documents, the fact that so many people have Google accounts makes Drive convenient. Information from statistical


providers is brought together by Google’s public data explorer, which graphs and animates results;


however, it does not include the main UK statisticians such as the Office for National Statistics (http:// www.ons.gov.uk). Google Scholar lists academic papers. Google’s offerings for journalists


are at https://newslab.withgoogle. com. These include Google Trends, which shows what people are searching for, and an image search to find photos that have been used elsewhere. The News Lab also provides training and email support for the media.


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