Tom Chatfield is a British writer and commentator. The author of five books exploring digital culture - most recently, Netymology (Quercus, 2013), telling the stories and secret histories of digital words: from apps and @ signs to daemons and zombies - his work has appeared in over a dozen territories and languages. Tom has worked as a writer and consultant with companies including Google and Mind Candy, and spoken at forums including TED Global and the World IT Congress. A fortnightly columnist for the BBC, he also writes fiction and plays jazz piano. Tom is also on the judging panel of this year's GWG Awards

My Favourite Website... If you looked simply at time spent, it would have to be Twitter; but the dearest digital place in my heart is probably Google Books, simply for its power and utility. As an author, there’s something a little scary about so much of written history being made available and searchable like this – but it’s also a staggering resource, and one I can imagine great writers from previous eras envying more than almost any other modern opportunity.

My Favourite App... Plenty of games have consumed far more of my time than I’m comfortable admitting – perhaps above all the puzzle game Drop 7 – but for sheer usefulness, I find it hard to beat the simplest app on my phone: flashlight. It’s fast and extremely bright: perfect for finding dropped keys in the dark. I can’t quite believe all mobile phones don’t come with this kind of feature fully integrated.

My Favourite Blog... Book blog The Millions is hard to beat for breadth and depth of coverage. “Who says lit coverage can’t survive online?” is one of its taglines, and the whole site is a fine riposte to those dooming and glooming about serious writing in the 21st century.

My Most Recent Buy Online... I buy several books a week, most frequently via Amazon onto my Kindle – so fast, so easy, and so satisfying to start reading moments after spotting something intriguing. My best recent purchase was James Gleick’s book The Information: an enthralling, wonderful history interweaving technology and ideas like few other works of non-fiction I’ve read.

My Favourite Tweeter... Twitter is a great medium for campaigning, and British doctor and author Ben Goldacre pulls this off better than most: he’s a formidable force for rigour and accountability in medicine and public health, and something of a geek idol to boot.

My Pet Hate About Life Online... The sorrows and joys of digital tech are always closely interwoven: everyone gets their say, and this is brilliant and terrifying. Finding time to think your own thoughts – to work out what you yourself think, and to formulate this precisely – can feel harder than ever amid the torrents of information.

Social Media Allowed Me to Meet... I love the small coincidences social media permits: the way you can suddenly turn a connection into something deeper. I was in California for a conference a while ago, and discovered that some people I knew online who worked at the NASA Ames research centre were in the local area. We went out for beers, and a fantastic evening of conversation followed. I’d love that to happen more often.

My Stand Out Online Memory... I remember being shown, back in the late 1990s, one of the first ever graphical Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games by a good friend: Ultima Online. There was this entire world on his screen. All the other characters, he explained, were being controlled by real people across the world. It astonished me. I’d never seen anything like it before – and I try to hold onto that astonishment today.

Most Worthwhile Mailer Subscribed To... There are very few regular emails that I welcome into my crowded inbox, but I do look forward to my weekly update from Aeon magazine. Rather than bombarding you with content, it picks out three in-depth essays and then leaves you alone to enjoy them at leisure. With newsletters, less is definitely more.

August 2013.