Challenge for November: No Google Software.
That's where I'd have trouble.
That's where I'd have trouble.
Mail: gmail is integrated deeply into my workflow. Hard to live without it.
Money: Adsense pays for my hosting bill so can't drop them, besides there is no worthy competitor with Adsense (for small blogs)
Analytics: Google's product is great and free but i would be very happy to try some alternative.
Docs: don't use google docs a lot. Not important.
Calendar: I have too few plans/appointments so a calendar is useless :-p
We're getting there.
I tried using Bing for a month. I lasted about 48 hours. One problem was that Google dominates Bing for technical searches and searches in Japanese, both of which are sort of important to me.
A bigger problem was that my fingers will type www.google.com into my URL bar without me even asking them to any time I have a question about something. (In browser search box, what's that? I'm stuck in my ways...) The only way I could have overcome this habit would have been using my hosts file to redirect google.com to a Bing server, and I was worried that would lock me out of the Google services I need to run my business.
If you are using the mouse to get to the location bar that's an insane time delay, but if you are using ctrl+l then typing "www.google.com" you are at something like 584,000 over the same 10 per day for 10 years period. That's an entire novel of "www.google.comwww.google.comwww.google.comwww.google.comwww.google.com", plus the time spent typing and the time for the extra unneeded page load. Think hard about changing to ctrl+k on firefox or ctrl+l on chrome (or ctrl+l plus "g" hotword on firefox if you got rid of the searchbar).
Project Wonderful? They seem to get decent results:
http://www.blogcatalog.com/discuss/entry/project-wonderful-v...
If your blog has a product focus or could contextually be linked to a product (e.g. if you blog a lot about cameras, say) then I know people have had a lot of success with Chitika in this regard.
Google search, I'd hate to count how many times every day.
Other than that, analytics and adsense.
Yahoo has a competitive analytics package (http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/), and really, Bing results are generally just fine. Sure, it'd be harder, but that's the point of the experiment.
That is a challenge. My blog is on appengine, I prototype appengine, groups, search. Have to think about that one.