What prompted Fatal Error's interest in the dotcom boom and bust? It's a great story: the way these young, late-20th-century "heroes" got involved in the growth of these companies and seemed to be making millions before their worlds fell apart! I was intrigued by the emotional strain it put on a lot of them - often they were small groups of friends or relatives joined in these ventures. Obviously I could add a little bit of exaggeration to that pressure - throw in a murder and I was well away!

So will the dotcoms rise again? I think the net is clearly part of the future for all of us but I think a business that understands something, be it news, groceries or entertainment, will do it through its own internet activities. So you won't get a generic groceries.com but you will have Tesco.com dominating that side of the net. I don't think there will be many new dotcom businesses that are purely about the internet - the net is a way of doing something; it's not an end in itself.

Microsoft - saint or sinner? Definitely a huge sinner! Microsoft has extracted billions of dollars from computer users and instead of using it to encourage innovation it uses it to deaden innovation. Its OS is so flabby that people have always had to use larger computers just to run it. I think Bill Gates has been brilliant at getting into such a position of monopoly and then extracting so much money from it. I think we'd all be much better off if it'd never existed!

Gadgets? I was almost embarrassed to mention it but it's a Psion Series 7. The keyboard is excellent and I use it for writing on the move - the only thing that's annoying about it is its compatibility with PCs. I wish Psion had carried on with its PDAs rather than getting involved in Symbian. The next generation of Psions could have been amazing!

Michael Ridpath's favourites

For rugby: www.rfu.tv

For finance: news.ft.com/home/uk

For property speculation: www.christiesgreatestates.com

For the rest: www.google.co.uk