I just learned about his sudden death via a mailing list I subscribe to. Take a look though the list of publications on his site (many of them available in full text) to get an idea of the many contributions he made to the understanding of the social impacts of computing. It’s sad he won’t be able to provide any more similar insights.

Tom Coates suggests that because weblogs tend to link more to other sites that have useful information or views on a subject, one can get to “100% information saturation on any given subject in the blogosphere without reading anywhere near 100% of the weblogs in it”.

But while he qualifies the statement later on to “100% of the information available in the blogosphere” there remains an unspoken assumption that because there are so many weblogs and sites out there, there will be thoughtful posts on any given subject. But how many – say – liberal arts professors have weblogs or even websites? How many trade union leaders or indeed politicians? How many people living in the developing world?

Moreover the idea that more incoming links > a more informative opinion is flawed. People often link to things they disagree with or think are stupid(*), and sites that start being the most popular have a substantial advantage in likelihood of being linked to again simply because more people visit them and have a chance to see a view. If an issue like “will Venice sink into the sea” turns up in the news, and a weblogger who has hitherto laboured in obscurity happens to be the world expert on the subject, what is the likelihood that enough people will find her to make her weblog rise to visibility through the haze of links that are popular just because the posters are?

This is also the problem with search engines like Google that weight pages by number of inbound links – the results appear good, but lots of stuff that might be better remains obscure because it doesn’t yet have lots of incoming links. In fact the more useful the links you do find are the more dangerous it is because you may fail to realise the extent of what’s missing.

(*) Some people (can’t remember who offhand, though) have the clever idea of trying to put metadata into the HTML of links saying useful stuff like “I think this link contains useful/useless information” or “I agree/disagree with this link”. They want to come up with something that could be accepted as a standard. Of course the “installed base” of links out there is collosal so even if successful it would take years for this innovation to have much of an impact.