My digital life: Neill Pawsey

What’s your most played MP3?

At the moment, I’m listening a lot to Lessons to be Learned by Gabriella Cilmi.

Do you read books and articles online?

I am about to embark on a daunting, four-year engineering research doctorate at Loughborough university, so I do a lot of research online. When it comes to books, it tends to be popular science – I’m not a great fiction reader.

Do you use any social networks?

I am a fully signed-up advocate of social networking. I started to use MySpace, but Facebook now features more often – it’s a great way to locate long-lost friends. I also have a LinkedIn profile, and am interested in how the forthcoming Be2Camp event in London is being organised through a website called Ning (ning.com).

What’s your favourite bookmark?

I have a whole raft of favourites – mainly sites related to the construction sector and to mobile IT. The COMIT website (comitproject.org.uk) features highly and, perhaps reflecting my parents’ newspaper reading habits, I tend to use The Daily Telegraph website (telegraph.co.uk) quite a bit – it has some good IT pages. I follow and play cricket a lot, so the sports section of the BBC website (bbc.co.uk) is also a big favourite, as is Cricinfo (cricinfo.com).

What have you bought online recently?

I regularly buy CDs and books from Amazon, and I use eBay – the last thing I bought was a second-hand towbar kit for my car.

Your favourite online meeting place?

I tend to use whatever proprietary meeting tools are specified by meeting colleagues, like GoToMeeting.co.uk. I would like to use Skype, but my home broadband connection isn’t great, though I will be upgrading the office link shortly. I’m also fascinated with the idea of having meetings in Second Life.

What’s in your digital holster?

I used to use a PDA equipped with Windows Mobile, but I recently got a BlackBerry, which I am exploring, but haven’t quite reached the “CrackBerry” stage yet!

Email or snail mail?

Email, but I am also interested in other messaging services. We might try using Twitter to communicate from the COMIT website, for example.