Tom Chatfield is a British writer and commentator. The author of four books exploring digital culture – most recently How to Thrive in the Digital Age (Pan Macmillan) – 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, plays jazz piano, and tweets at @TomChatfield.

TOM'S FAVOURITE SITES 

Philosophy Bites – Featuring free bite-sized podcast interviews with over a hundred of the world’s most significant thinkers (and counting), Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds’s site is a one-stop argument for the web’s credentials as a home for the very best of human thought.

Kongregate – Tens of thousands of free-to-play video games written in Flash, created, uploaded and vigorously debated by the player community: its contents vary from simple arcade-style fun to beautiful, oddball works of art. Eminently worth a few days – or weeks – of interactive exploration.

Google Books – The search giant has courted controversy with its attitude towards copyright, but its online books tool remains a remarkable resource. Search and browse millions of pages from the last half millennium of written culture; view scans of rare, precious and ancient texts; and generally lose yourself in the serendipitous world of words.

boingboing – A “directory of wonderful things”, this is one of the essential resources for keeping up to date with the delightful cutting edge of geek culture – not to mention the ideas of some of its leading thinkers, from the realms of science fiction through to artistic, computer science and engineering innovation.

xkcd – The world’s best web-comic? In my opinion, yes, for its sheer consistency of insight, wit and celebration of the best of digital culture – while never forgetting to skewer the present’s contradictions and absurdities.

The Orwell Diaries – Something completely different. Using the blog form as a way of republishing the great author’s daily record of the years 1938-42 injects a new kind of urgency into history – and offers an opportunity to savour insights that both capture a vanished time and cast present politics and culture into sharp relief.

July 2012