I discovered Twitter, as I remember, and the idea of watching a global conversation go by immediately struck me as a fantastic thing. So I suppose it's not TwitterVision per se that excited me, but Twitter itself and its implications.

What did it for me was a blurb on the back of a book I was reading. The blurber wrote - I just looked it up - that "Trials have provided some of the best examples of 'micro-history' or the 'new narrative'...." And that was it.

These days I'm probably happiest when I see my two daughters loving one another.

Every now and again your life's course can turn on one simple thing, some small decision the import of which isn't at all obvious at the time.

My book review site and first blog, which I started in 2003. I started it because I was lamenting that while I read so much, I could hardly remember any of it. People would ask me what good books I'd read recently, or what I thought of a particular book, and my mind would go blank. At the same time, I'd just heard of blogging and found the idea interesting and thought I'd give it a try.

In researching literary agents I did what the books tell you to do: I looked at the acknowledgments page of a book that was similar to mine. Happily, that author thanked his agent. I looked up the agent on the web and found out that he not only represented authors writing books similar to mine, but I knew some of his clients! So, I sent in the manuscript, and they decided to represent it.

I don't understand the mechanics behind things, so a site that I find impressive may not really be more technologically advanced than something which is ostensibly uninteresting.