I’ve always been impressed with the way Sweden and other nordic countries seem to balance a successful economy while providing very high public services and social care.

UpMyStreet.com‘s neighbourhood profiles are pretty good.

Here’s what they say about my area:
Neighbourhoods fitting this profile are found primarily in Inner London in Westminster, Camden, Islington, Haringey and Hackney as well as in Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Here is an overview of the likely preferences and features of your neighbourhood:
Family income Very high
Interest in current affairs Very high
Housing – with mortgage Low
Educated – to degree Very high
Couples with children Very low
Have satellite TV Low

These young people live in urban areas in purpose built and converted flats. This group has the highest levels of people aged 25-29. They are very highly qualified, and are making their way up the career ladder in the professions and managerial roles. They earn high salaries.

40% of people live alone. There are also high numbers sharing larger properties. They are typically renting rather than buying, which reflects the more transient nature of these communities.

They are hard working and as a result make optimum use of their leisure time. They are twice as likely to use services such as ordering their groceries online for home delivery, and the Internet for shopping.

These people are keen readers and have wide interests which include art, music, the theatre and cinema. They also eat out regularly in restaurants and pubs. They really like to travel abroad and will take the full range of holidays including winter sun and snow, weekend breaks and long haul trips.

Given their high incomes, they do invest some of their money in a broad range of investments. They are keen users of credit cards for their purchases, with high monthly spend and correspondingly high credit limits.

This type more closely follows current affairs than any other. Like other urban groups, they will buy a daily paper to read on the way to work and will choose from the Financial Times, The Guardian and Independent. On Sundays they choose the Observer and The Sunday Times.

This pretty much describes me exactly, well exactly some of it is more what I would like to be than currently am (ie, keen reader, arts, full use of leisure time, high salary).

So, a couple of years a go we had a teacher shortage crisis, today we are still short of teachers, recruiting from all over the world to fill the shortage. With such a high demand, those who do not really have the right skills (even if they have the qualifications) to teach, inspire and control a class are finding jobs. Oh and add to that a large number of teachers are soon to retire. You are the government, what do you do? reduce the number of teacher training places of course. Obvious. That’s why mere mortals like us will never be able to come up with such great ideas.

Google Reader. Summary: nice way of reading your favorite blogs and news sites. Keyboard short cuts are great.

The less good bits: no way to mark all posts as read, usefuil if haven’t read for a couple of days. Also very slow to add a number of feeds at once. Add each feed takes five or so clicks, and you end up back at your Google Reader homepage, and so have to repeat process all over again.

Finally, there seems to be a whole load of stories that are never marked as read for me, and currently constantly sitting at the top of my ‘to be read list’. annoying.

Time to take stock on how much I rely on my google drip of goodness and tools. What happens if they take it away from me. Cold turkey like. I would die dear reader. die.

Any way, So for work I use Google Scholar, and I’ve set ‘Google University search as our University departmental website search engine. Then there’s my gmail account (which I can not mention without slipping in that I was one of the first to get one, and was invited by Google themselves, yes, I’m on first names terms with Larry and Sergey… um sort of) and my ‘google groups’ account for newsgroups.

I read the news with Google news, and have various news alerts coming to me each week (which are real useful). I’ve installed Google Desktop, and Firefox of course uses Google search by default.

I love Google maps, so much quicker than multimap.com. I contantly use the various tools and extras and often check google labs. I’ve signed up for Google adsense (adverts on my website), and almost made a whole dollar. And lets not forget my old blogger.com account plus Picasa and Google Earth software.

Now there’s Google Reader, a Feedster alike RSS reader. It can import RSS subscription list from other sources. What would have the best list to import? Of couse that would be Google Desktop at work, which displays emails, news feeds and loads of other stuff down the side of my desktop. It adds RSS fields to it’s list of news sources as I browse. So I’m importing from one Google app to another.

They have my email, files, RSS feeds, newgroups I read and know who clicks on my adverts, If Google ever turn evil then I’m fucked.