Your digital world

What is the one website you couldn’t live without?

iGoogle – feeds from pertinent news sites all in one place, along with my email and various other bits and pieces of information that I like to have to hand.

What is your favourite gadget?

Boring, but it would have to be my BlackBerry. There’s plenty about it that I don’t like, but it does put a lot of what I need in one place in a form that I can at least live with.

What’s the most useful website you access for your work?

There is no one website (aside from Google for searching) – no one yet has all the right info in one place. Perhaps more importantly, no one is having the right discussions, so no point/counterpoint. So you still need to access a number of different websites per issue to get the background and read around the subject if you want to listen to different views backed up with evidence.

What was the last track you downloaded?

Poems 4 Post Modern Decay by Zion 1 featuring Aesop Rock.

Who is your favourite blogger?

I don’t have one.

What was the subject of the last email you received?

The Conservatives’ green paper on improving the energy efficiency of the existing housing stock.

Social networking or face-to-face?

Definitely real rather than the web. There’s too much going backward and forward to be done over a website. It would take days to have a proper conversation and I can always find something more important to do than respond to a thread on a forum. If someone is here in front of me we can go backward and forward much quicker and get to the interesting stuff much more speedily. As for group versus one-on-one, it depends. Obviously group discussions can be more varied, but it’s difficult to get everyone on the same wavelength and to focus the conversation. One-on-one can be more productive/decisive, but you could just be convincing each other that you’re right. Ultimately, it depends on the people involved and their ability to question their own views robustly.

What’s the best link you’ve been sent?

I don’t think it was supposed to be funny so I probably shouldn’t say. It involved a rather novel building design and some fairly fanciful performance claims.

What’s the last thing you bought online?

Music (as per earlier question). Other than that, it would probably be books. They have titles so dull that you really don’t want to know the details.

What’s the funniest piece of spam you have received?

I have decent spam filters and seem to be able to avoid receiving huge amounts of spam (touch wood).