FOR a very rough idea of the main movers and shakers on the Internet, and the most popular authors on the World Wide Web, look at their Web ratings. These are the number of Web pages devoted to these people or mentioning their names, as found by "search engines" such as Alta Vista (or in that squiggledy piggledy Webspeak that everyone seems to be using nowadays, http.//www.altavista.com). Alta Vista automatically and continually indexes every page on the Web, and here's how Alta Vista ranked the following 10 authors earlier this week:
10=: Esther Dyson
Web rating: 1,000
Daughter of British astrophysicist Freeman Dyson, she's a computer adviser and securities analyst, sits on the boards of the Santa Fe Institute (a major science centre for the study of complexity and chaos theory) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a lobby group for civil rights in cyberspace). Expect her Web rating to zoom up after the publication of her new book, Release 2.0: Second Thoughts on the Digital Age. Worldwide advances outside the US total more than £1 million - astonishing for someone who was a publishing unknown a month ago before the Frankfurt Book Fair.
10=: Douglas Coupland
Web rating: 1,000
Thirtysomething author of Microserfs (novel about the kooky high tech, high speed world of five Microsoft employees), he has also sold over 400,000 copies of Generation X, giving today's twentysomethings something to call themselves. Still lives around the corner from William Gibson in Vancouver.
8: Nicholas Negroponte
Web rating: 2,000
The head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's legendary Media Lab in Boston, which dreams up often highly futuristic technologies and software. Negroponte is also a multimillionaire on paper after being a start up investor in hip magazine Wired, and has recycled his monthly Wired columns into the best selling book Being Digital. Spends much of his time on international flights chasing around $19 million of corporate funding, grants and gifts for the lab.
7=: Chris Carter
Web rating: 3,000
The man who created The X Files admits that the show couldn't survive without cellular phones, Apple Mac computers, the Internet and the Anderson Sisters. Gillian Anderson (Agent Scully) regularly battles against Pamela Anderson (Baywatch) and Laurie Anderson (multimedia artist) in popularity polls on the Web.
7=: Marshall McLuhan
Web rating: 3,000
Culture critic and fan of Finnegans Wake who is best known as a 1960s media and technology guru. Later fell out of favour before his death in 1980, but within the Internet his ghostly presence lingers on, particularly through his more catchy slogans ("The medium is the message", "the global village").
5: Brian Eno
Web rating: 4,000
A frequent visitor to Ireland (particularly as U2's producer), and a veritable Renaissance man of cyberspace. Not only a much in demand record producer, he's the father of ambient music and, when not doodling with the computer paint package Photoshop, is a composer, performer, curator and all round thinker. His busy life is reflected in his recently published 1995 diary, A Year With Swollen Appendices. Expect to hear a lot more about his "generative music" and the software package Koan. It uses a sort of controlled randomness where you give a computer initial rules or seeds, then it creates infinitely different pieces of music within these parameters.
4=: Douglas Adams:
Web rating: 7,000
Worked at various times as a hospital porter, chicken shed cleaner, bodyguard, radio producer, script editor of Doctor Who, Apple Macintosh proselytiser, guest guitarist in Pink Floyd and author of numerous humorous sci fi books including The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
4=: Tim Berners-Lee
Web rating: 7,000
The British scientist who invented the World Wide Web (and you thought it was American) in 1990, while he was working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Lab in Switzerland. Now based at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology.
2: William Gibson
Web rating: 8,00 0(See above)
1: Bill Gates
Web rating: 20,000
Contrary to popular belief, the author of The Road Ahead didn't invent the PC or the Internet. He wasn't the first to come up with DOS either, or Windows style computer interfaces or Web browsers. Nonetheless Microsoft's co-founder has managed to make himself one of the richest men in the world by capitalising on these inventions, making him probably the single most loved and most hated person on the Internet.