In 1994, the Internet grabbed me by the lapels and said, “Come here, kid.” I learned all about HTML and TCP/IP but I knew nothing about raising money or starting a company. It was David Talbot who had the totally unshakeable belief that it would be possible, not only creatively but financially, to start an independent Web site where he and a group of writers and editors from the San Francisco Examiner, including me, could try to do their best work.

Since the news of his stepping down as editor of Salon broke today, it seems the right time to tip my hat to his ingenuity and tenacity and guts over the years of starting Salon, shaping it, and keeping it afloat in high tides and low ebbs.

I’m getting asked a bit about what the transitions at Salon mean for me, so I’ll mention what I’ve said in this space before: I’m thrilled to be working on my book, but I would never have felt right about taking a break from Salon in the first place if I didn’t have deep trust and confidence in the people who are now in charge. Joan Walsh and Betsy Hambrecht are smart and energetic and creative, and they will, I’m sure, keep Salon moving in good directions. I’ll be continuing to enjoy my new status as a reader of the site who doesn’t know everything that’s going to be published beforehand. And when my own project is done I hope to return to Salon and contribute to its next chapters.

There’s a useful and engaging discussion unfolding about “folksonomies” — emergent, user-shaped taxonomies of metadata like those in Flickr and Delicious (Adam Mathes’ thorough and detailed paper is here, Lou Rosenfeld offers measured dissent here, Clay Shirky fires back here). This topic reminds me of discussions we had back in 1999 and 2000, when we were building the Salon Directory.

We needed a tagging scheme for Salon articles, and some of the software developers felt that we should just generate a list of categories and build drop-down menus into the content management system. We had hired a smart consultant who argued that we should instead just let our editors add tags to stories in a free-form way, and allow the resulting categories to shape the “back catalog” of stories. As long as we occasionally did some gardening of the resulting keyword list — combining duplicate categories and handling complex issues (which “president bush”, exactly?) as they arose — we’d have a flexible, expandable schema naturally emerging from our daily work flow.

Our consultant was plainly right, and whatever problems the Salon Directory has had over the years have been more the result of limited software development resources on our part than of any fundamental mistakes in its conception. So within the confines of the Salon staff we had our own little “folksonomy” growing.

The biggest problems have not been those of organization, classification or structure but the simpler ones of time and effort. We made it relatively easy on our staff to add keywords, and some are added automatically, but it’s still a constant struggle to make sure every story is well keyworded. Some editors are more conscientious than others; all are on deadline much of the time; and the pressures of an “all-the-time” publishing schedule mean that today’s good intention of going back and fixing yesterday’s metadata failure usually falls prey to the demands of tomorrow’s stories.

I think this is what Shirky is getting at when he talks about how expensive it is to “build, maintain and enforce a controlled vocabulary.” Here’s in-the-field evidence that it’s not so cheap or easy to “build, maintain and enforce” even a within-the-firewall folksonomy. And so, much as I love the approaches of Flickr and Delicious, I also worry that the value of the tagging ecosystems emerging on those services will grow for a while and then, sadly, decline. Early adopters are enthusiastic and willing to take the time to tag; as the services grow, people are less likely to devote that time and care.

Which of course does not mean that these aren’t great projects — I agree with Shirky that they are far better than the alternative because the alternative, most often, is nothing at all. But when Rosenfeld and others wonder about the scalability of folksonomies, I think the issue may be less the scale of individual tags (50 billion “cat” photos!) than the scale of human enthusiasm for doing the slog-work of classification. Geeks love tidying up their personal dataspaces because, obviously, they’re geeks. For the rest of the world, my hunch is that — even when they’re only classifying the tiny sliver of stuff that’s their own — most people would rather do almost anything else.

I’ve been an admirer of Joel Spolsky’s writing on software since I started reading it several years ago. Last month when I was in New York I sat down with Joel and had a good long talk about software development, partly for the purpose of my book research and partly because I knew he’d be entertaining and thoughtful. Today’s Salon features a write-up of the interview, pegged in part to the publication of a book collection of Spolsky’s essays.

I read this New York Times op-ed by Iranian Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi with great interest. Ebadi complains about the absurd U.S. Treasury Department rules that prevent American publishers from commissioning or editing work by people in Iran:

We encountered this ridiculous regulation here at Salon a couple of years ago in trying to pay a reporter who was spending time in Iran. Applying the rules of trade embargos to informational products is not only silly, it’s counterproductive to the United States’ larger global effort. We should be working hard to open up the flow of information into and out of these so-called axis-of-evil nations — not behaving like petty dictators eager to clamp down on the free reporting of news and expression of ideas.

Oh, wait, that is the order of the day for our new, improved, “mandate”-driven democracy. I guess it all makes sense.

Here’s the AP on the COPA ruling. Says it was a 5-4. Court upheld the original injunction against putting the law into effect. Could conceivably go back to lower court for full trial if the Ashcroft Justice Department chooses to — then we’ll be fighting this poorly conceived and written law for another five years. Another area where a change in administration might be salutary — though Clinton signed the original COPA, it’s not at all clear whether a less porn-obsessed Justice Department would have pursued the case as avidly as Ashcroft has.

MSNBC just sent out their news alert on this opinion under this headline: “Supreme Court blocks Web child porn law from taking effect.” As has been the case from day one of this matter, COPA gets labeled inaccurately as a “child porn law,” when in fact it has essentially nothing to do with child pornography, something that is already seriously outlawed. COPA is about censoring the Internet — ostensibly it aims to protect children from porn, but in reality its provisions are so broad and riddled with holes that, while it could be used to harass legitimate Web sites fostering grownup debate on controversial issues (like Salon), it would be entirely useless in actually keeping real porn away from kids.

I don’t have details yet, but Ann Beeson of the ACLU, who has represented Salon and many other plaintiffs in the long-running litigation over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), just sent out the following: “We just learned that the Supreme Court struck down COPA. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 6-3 opinion in our favor.” I wrote about the Supreme Court arguments in March here. More info when I get a copy of the opinion.

Even if you’ve been following the social-software boom for the last couple of years, you will probably find some eye-opening insights in “You Are Who You Know,” Andrew Leonard’s great two-part feature on the subject in Salon this week (part one, part two). If Friendster and its spawn remain a mystery to you, the series will be even more essential to you. When Andrew took up the editor’s hat here, Salon (largely) lost a great reporter and writer. Good to have him back in such fine form.

The full text of the amicus brief by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Salon and other organizations — filed as part of the ACLU’s challenge to the USA Patriot Act — is now available. (See my original posting on this for more.)

The ACLU also has a lot more information online about the proceeding. Here’s the ACLU’s news release.

One of the more remarkable news stories to break in the past month, a time of many remarkable stories, told of the strange saga of the ACLU’s challenge to the PATRIOT act. It turned out that, under a provision of the PATRIOT Act itself, the ACLU had been barred even from telling anyone about its challenge to the PATRIOT Act, and had to fight the Bush administration just to be able to announce its suit.

This bit of Kafkaesque logic may seem positively un-American. But it makes sense within the increasingly divorced-from-reality, driven-by-images, shoot-the-messenger world of the Bush administration. Here, a secretary of defense get really steamed not about the fact of torture in a U.S.-run prison (hey, shit happens!) but about losing control of the flow of images about that torture. Here, in the wake of the worst geopolitical strategic mistakes committed by a U.S. leader since Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam escalation, a president decides that his first priority must be — a P.R. offensive!

(Sorry for the digression: it’s hard to stay on track when the news provides so many sidings into bitter absurdity.)

Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief in the ACLU’s case, and Salon — on behalf, in particular, of The WELL, which is a Salon subsidiary — is proud to be among the signers. They also include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the U.S. Internet Industry Association, and the Online Policy Group.

What’s at issue here, chiefly, is a provision of the PATRIOT Act that (to quote from the EFF brief) “authorizes the FBI to compel the production of subscriber and communications records in the possession of a broad range of Internet-related communications service providers, potentially covering billions of records from tens of thousands of entities. These demands, known as National Security Letters (NSLs), are issued without judicial oversight of any kind, yet allow the FBI to obrain a vast amount of constitutionally protected information.” The brief — a “friend of the court” filing in which parties who feel they have interests at stake in a proceeding offer legal arguments that complement those of the plaintiffs — argues that the Act is not only constitutionally overbroad but also “not cabined by any intelligible standard”: in other words, there’s no way to make sense of it in terms of the realities of the Internet today.

The WELL has a long history of helping define the shape of Internet users’ rights and responsibilities. As the Bush administration continues to push beyond the edges of reasonable legal means in its conduct of the “war on terror,” we’ll keep doing what we can to fight back and protect the privacy of our users, customers and community members.

(I will post a link to the brief as soon as it’s online.)