Ten years ago today, Salon.com, the website I helped found in 1995 along with a group of colleagues from the San Francisco Examiner under the leadership of David Talbot, went public. We raised $25 million in an IPO that, from the vantage of a decade later, looks mirage-like in its improbability.

Today, of course, a Web company with little to offer besides some (extremely good) original content could never raise $25 million from investors, right? Actually, it seems to happen again and again. Strangely, this is a road that others continue to charge down with, apparently, only a vague sense of the history or the pitfalls.

One of the things we were proudest of about Salon’s IPO was the open, Dutch-auction style approach taken by our lead investment bank, W.R. Hambrecht & Co. (Jim Surowiecki wrote about the approach in Slate.) Hambrecht’s idea was to make the entire IPO process more fair and transparent by allowing investors to participate in setting the opening price in public through a novel auction approach. Our choice of this model was later vindicated when another little Silicon Valley company named Google adopted it for its own IPO in 2004.

Other things about that era are, certainly, painful to contemplate from this distance. The idea of using the IPO proceeds to go on a hiring binge looks insane, in retrospect — even though it was “what everyone else was doing” and it was what the company had explicitly promised investors it was going to do with their money. Almost precisely one year after the IPO, Salon, having grown to roughly 140 employees, would begin the first of several rounds of layoffs that eventually returned the company to the rational size it has remained at, roughly, to this day. (Read Gary Kamiya’s piece on Salon history from the site’s tenth anniversary in 2005 for more on all this.)

As I’ve written, during the dotcom bubble I was a father of newborn twins, and I spent much of the era in a haze of caffeine and adrenaline. Meanwhile, the pace of decision-making at Salon at the time was crazy — we were one small precinct of an entire industrial outbreak of madness. One conclusion I’ve drawn from that experience for myself is: never rely on a vehicle that’s moving too fast to steer. (And no, to answer a question some will probably have, I never made a cent on the offering myself: insiders weren’t allowed to sell stock at first, and by the time we were allowed to, the price had already begun to plummet. Besides, I really did believe in the company’s future.)

Salon survived, against the predictions of a chorus of schadenfreude-driven critics, and found its place as the Web resumed its growth from the post-bust rubble. I left the company two years ago to work on Say Everything, but I’m proud of the project I conceived and developed in my final year there, Open Salon. Under Kerry Lauerman’s leadership it has emerged as a true community of writers and readers — in some ways, fulfilling the original concept of Salon that David Talbot articulated in 1995 even more fully than the old-school Salon site.

Every post I’m writing here at Wordyard these days is mirrored over at my Open Salon blog (as well as on Facebook and other services). Write once, publish everywhere, talk with people anywhere they want to engage with you: not a concept that would have made it into a 1999 IPO prospectus, but one that makes a lot of simple Web sense today.

I will poke my head up ever so briefly from my labors to note that I have a book review up at Salon today of Randall Stross’s new “Planet Google.”

Here’s a couple passages:

“Planet Google” further reinforces the picture we now have of Google as the Mr. Spock of Internet companies: intellectually supreme, agile and engaged with the world, but prone to respond to the unpredictable behavior of its customers by cocking an eyebrow and exclaiming, “Highly irrational!”

Is there a Bones McCoy anywhere in the company who can provide a humanist counterweight to all that calculation? Maybe — but you’re not likely to learn who it is from Stross’ research. “Planet Google” is solid and informative, and Stross, refreshingly, avoids the frothier sort of Google hype sometimes heard from the tech-punditry choir. But the book is hardly the insider’s-eye view of Google that it has been painted to be.

Also:

If Google is going to falter over the coming decade, it is likely to be the result of avidly pursuing its “organize the world’s information” goal even as the evidence mounts that its Spock-like principles and engineering-first culture may not get the company to its destination. Stross’ account provides several case studies — including accounts of the oddly neglected Orkut social networking site and the ill-fated Google Answers service — in which innovative Google ventures foundered because of the company’s clumsiness at managing human interaction.

Not one but two big developments (coincidentally simultaneous) in projects that are intertwined with my life! The first, noted below, was Chandler 1.0. The second is the unveiling — for what is being labeled a public beta — of something called Open Salon.

While the news is not live on the Salon site yet, it’s already on Techmeme, so I’m going to go ahead and note it.

Open Salon is the present incarnation of a project I proposed a long time ago at Salon as we tried to figure out a future for the old Salon Blogs program, which had been built on Radio Userland, a program that had fallen by the wayside.

When Dreaming in Code was done I returned to Salon and started to work on it. A year and a half later, we had some neat prototypes, but we were still awfully far from launching, I got excited about a new book idea, and it was time for me to move on.

The Open Salon that opens its doors today — it’s been in private beta for a while — is an outgrowth of the work I did back then, but of course over the past year the project has evolved much further. I’ve been concentrating too assiduously on my book deadline to do more than cheer the present effort from afar, and I can take little credit for much of anything about Open Salon in its present form. It’s the work of Kerry Lauerman and his team — and, now that the participants are using it, it’s in the hands of Salon’s readers the people formerly known as Salon’s readers, to make of it something new and exciting.

The one thing I’ll claim is to say, proudly, that from day one at Salon I was the editor pushing the publication hardest toward opening out to the Web and experimenting with ways of using it to bridge the ancient divide between writer and reader. I’m delighted to see Salon taking this next step. Congratulations to everyone there who helped make it happen.

There’s a post by Matthew Ingram up already. Also one at CNet (“Salon launches blogger ‘tipping’ system”) that, I think, may put far too much emphasis on one small feature of the project — the “tip jar.” I have no inside information but it seems inevitable to me that Salon will want to experiment with the whole idea of reward mechanisms, and I would be really surprised if the “tip jar” was the only effort made in that direction.

UPDATE: Joan Walsh’s official announcement about Open Salon is now up.

Tomorrow I plan to attend the “Customer Service is the New Marketing” conference that the folks from Get Satisfaction are holding at the Presidio. This doesn’t sound like my normal field but it’s actually a topic close to my heart.

At Salon I was a big believer in customer support as an ambassadorial function for the company. At the site’s launch in 1995, I manned the e-mail barricades, responding personally to most of what came in. (In those days, getting a few hundred messages for a Web site launch was a sign of runaway success.) When we launched Salon Premium in 2001, I handled the customer support myself for the first two weeks. If you’re an executive in charge of a Web launch, there is no better way to get a handle on what’s working and what’s not. And while it’s good to keep developers in the feedback loop as well, you can’t expect them to handle all the response — they’re likely to be busy fixing any of the problems users are uncovering.

Way back in the Pleistocene Andrew Leonard wrote a piece for Salon that I edited, describing a future in which more and more tech support problems could and would be solved by a quick Web search. Today, I don’t even bother attempting to communicate directly with most companies; who wants to navigate phone-tree hell? If I have a problem, I poke around on the Web until I find an answer. If I don’t, I’ll post a question on the likeliest Web forum.

So there’s interesting stuff happening in this area. I’ll see what’s worth reporting on tomorrow.

I was deeply saddened to hear from my former colleagues at Salon that Bob Watts, who served as Salon’s art director for many years, passed away early this morning after a long fight with cancer. (Joan Walsh’s remembrance is here. And here are other remembrances from Salon people.)

I knew Bob from his start at Salon as a photo intern in 1998, but worked closest with him during the dark years after the dotcom bubble burst, when Salon’s prospects were dim and budgets were slim. Some of Salon’s editors fought their own guerrilla battles against our financial woes by spending money they didn’t really have, and it was my job as managing editor to try to reel them back toward reality. I never had to do that with Bob: at the end of each month he’d calmly deposit the art department’s report on my desk, and it was so reliably in order and under budget that, I confess, I took to reviewing it less and less closely over the years. It could simply be counted on, as could he.

Stereotypes paint the artist as undisciplined and indulgent. Bob wasn’t a stereotype; he was the real thing, and so he approached his work with care and consideration, balancing his own abundant inspiration with the needs of the people around him, working fast on ridiculously tight deadlines to create consistently delightful images.

He must have produced, literally, thousands of Salon cover images over the years, each one a witty or moving or beautiful little time capsule. I will miss them, as I will miss him.

From the earliest days of the Web to the present, there’s been a fundamental split between people who get the value of “human-readable URLs” and people who don’t. A human-readable URL is a Web address that tells you a lot of useful information about the page it represents. For instance, Salon URLs always tell you the date an article was posted, the section of the site the article appeared in, and a few words describing the subject matter of the article. By comparison, the typical URL at, say, CNET, looks like this: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10895_7-6782817-1.html. It is, essentially, human-unreadable.

In the old days, writers and editors who actually knew and used HTML always appreciated a good human-readable URL; and typically, for the ugly gibberish URLs, we had to thank (some) software architects and (some) publication managers who’d never hand-coded a link themselves. At Salon, we editors knew we’d be typing (and proofing) a zillion of those URLs ourselves; we insisted on something we could work with. (Our developers “got it” too.)

The cause of human-readable URLs got a great shot in the arm when sites began trying to optimize themselves for Google, because Google gives a little extra weight to text hints in URLs. So a lot of sites (like the New York Times) that had a history of human-unfriendly page addresses began to do better.

Today, though, we’re taking a step backwards, or at least sideways, in the cause of human readability, thanks to the growing popularity of the “tinyurl.”

When the tinyurl first crossed my radar I understood it to be a convenient way to tame unmanageably long Web addresses. (The Tinyurl site focuses in particular on how long Web addresses break in email messages.)

That’s all fine. But the tinyurl giveth and the tinyurl taketh away. When you encode a Web address as a tinyurl you’re hiding its target. Normally, when I read an article on the Web that has a link, I’ll hover my cursor over the link to see where it points. Even on a site with human-unfriendly URLs like CNETs, at least I can see that the link points to CNET.

With a tinyurl, I know nothing about the link except what the author chose to say about it. I can’t tell if it’s a reference to an article I’ve already read. If I want to find out, I have no choice but to click.

My sense is that tinyurls have grown in popularity with the rise of Twitter (where the strict character limit of messages means you don’t want to fill up a whole message with an URL), as well as the growing use of mobile devices for Web-posting activities. These are perfectly understandable reasons. But still, each time I see a tinyurl I think, there goes another tiny piece of the Web’s transparency.

Dave Winer writes:

A J-school prof at Cal told me that most reporters have absolutely no idea which of their stories people read or don’t read. They’re flying blind. I bet TV news people are too.

But wait, it’s even worse than it appears. Not only do most reporters have no idea which stories are read, many if not most don’t want to know.

The traditional view in journalism is that such knowledge is corrupting. If you know what’s popular and what isn’t, you will be driven by such knowledge to degrade your product. So the proverbial “Chinese wall” that’s supposed to segregate editorial decision-making from business influence has generally kept readership data out of the newsroom.

At a crude level, journalists fear that, the more granular the information about readership and popularity, the faster the suits will crank up celebrity gossip and defund serious coverage. The falllacy here is that, sorry, the suits already know everything they need to know about the relative popularity of different kinds of content — it’s just the editorial people who are (often) in the dark.

And then there is a more sophisticated level: the idea that writers and editors themselves, unpressured by crude strongarming by the business side but simply motivated by their own human need for attention, will find their judgment subtly but inexorably shaped by detailed usage stats.

The second concern is, I think, at least partly real, but I don’t lose sleep over it. From day one at Salon, when we were a half-dozen people in sublet space who could barely access our servers, we circulated traffic data to our editors; it simply blew our minds that we could. Over the years we took some heat for the practice, but I still think it makes sense. Ignorance is never a very good state for a journalist. Why choose blindness? Knowing where readers click doesn’t have to dictate your decisions — unless your decisions are poorly reasoned to begin with. In the soup out of which good coverage bubbles, traffic data should be one ingredient of many.

The real defense against what used to be called “page-view pandering” is strong, smart editors and writers with their own moral compasses. If you have them, then they deserve access to as much information as exists. If you don’t have them, then you’ve got bigger problems, and restricting access to your traffic stats won’t save you.

Alberto Gonzales has bigger problems these days, but his Justice Department just lost the latest round in a longstanding Internet censorship conflict.

The Child Online Protection Act went on trial again in recent months, and today, again, a federal court has struck down the law — which would require commercial online publishers like Salon to make sure that their readers are over 18 or face criminal prosecution for publishing material that might be “harmful to minors.” Publishers are supposed to be able to protect themselves from prosecution by requiring site visitors to register with their credit cards, thus ostensibly demonstrating their adult status.

The law is supposedly only aimed at commercial pornographers, but the law is absurdly vague. Somehow, publishers are supposed to trust the Justice Department to make the right call and understand who is a “bad” publisher and who isn’t. Placing such trust was problematic when the law was passed, under the Clinton administration; in the era of Bush justice, doing so would be utterly foolish.

Here’s the decision, which concludes that:

COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) COPA is not narrowly tailored to the compelling interest of Congress; (2) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive and most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest;
and (3) COPA is impermissibly vague and overbroad.

I am proud that Salon has been a plaintiff in this suit since 1998, when the ACLU first launched it. (Here’s my account of the 1994 oral arguments before the Supreme Court in an earlier phase of the COPA fight.) I have no idea whether, defeated at every turn, the Justice Department will drag this proceeding into another decade by appealing it. In the meantime, we can take another deep breath and be glad for the victory.

Here’s the AP story. And here’s a post by Salon editor Joan Walsh, who testified in this most recent round of the case. And here’s the ACLU’s page. And here’s CNET’s story.

This week two well-known Washington Post journalists upped and quit their newsroom to start a new venture on the Net. That got tongues wagging across the blogosphere — and across the print business as well. In some quarters the action was granted watershed-like status. Brave souls striking forth from a crumbling old world into the wilderness? Or, er, rodents fleeing a listing mothership?

The hubbub simply sounds quaint to this grizzled veteran of the flight-from-print-to-Web meme. This isn’t the start of something big; it’s the latest in a long, long line of defections that have been piling up for many years. Chris Nolan notes some recent examples, including her own, in a letter to Romenesko; I flashed back somewhat further in time.

When a half-dozen of us left the S.F. Examiner newsroom en masse in 1995 to start Salon our colleagues looked at us like we were nuts. Give up good union jobs? Nobody wanted to read on the Web, anyway! John Markoff wrote in the New York Times that our departure was a harbinger of a new world in which newly independent “tribes” of journalists would break free from their corporate overlords and light out for the new territories.

I never felt very tribal, myself. I just know I’d rather help build something new and exciting than work for something old and valuable where all I could do was watch helplessly while its owners gutted and dismantled it. At Web 2.0 Roger McNamee repeated a point I’ve heard before: The newspaper industry is not doomed, it’s committing suicide. Its managers and owners have decided to “harvest” its value with 24 percent profit margins rather than invest the money to move its assets into a new era and onto a new platform.

In other words, you might say, journalists aren’t abandoning newspapers for the Web; rather, newspapers are abandoning journalism to the Web. Not all newspapers at the same pace, of course, and not all at once, and not without lots of fights. But the process is real, it has been underway for over a decade, and though it will take decades more to unfold it shows no sign of being reversible. The only thing notable about this week’s Post story is that the newsroom exodus is beginning to reach those places — like the Post, or the Times, or the Journal — where print journalism is likely to last longest.

Tonight on Salon’s cover — in our brand-spanking new home page design, which we’re quite proud of — you’ll find my interview with Steven Johnson. It’s about his fine new book, The Ghost Map, as well as sundry other topics, including his new tool for organizing the local Web, Outside.in; why cities aren’t environmental disasters; why nuclear terrorism is more of a long-term danger to city dwellers than bioterrorism or epidemic; how innovators change a scientific consensus; and more.

Johnson has been one of my favorite authors ever since his Interface Culture, which I wrote about back in 1997, so I relished the opportunity to talk with him once more.

Apologies for light blogging here. My spare time has been devoted to hunkering down on a big freelance project. It’s almost done, so normal programming here — including a return to Code Reads after an unplanned one-week break — will resume shortly. I have a couple of posts I wanted to make from OOPSLA, and a few other interesting things lined up.