For those asking questions about the deleted posts:

We're totally and entirely open to critical and negative posts here and anywhere in letters. If you've got a beef with something a Salon writer has written, write away -- this is the place for it. A brief look at virtually any Salon letters page shows how liberal this policy is.

But one standard we'll keep doing our best to enforce is to delete posts that contain over-the-top personal attacks, directed at either other letter writers or the author. That's admittedly a subjective standard, but since this is a "Letters to the Editor" space, the editors are going to interpret it. (In the future we hope to improve the Letters software with other features, like community-based moderation, but that's not going to happen overnight.)

In this case, we removed a letter that called Keillor names and contained no other substantive comments about the article. We also deleted a response that consisted entirely of name-calling directed at the author of the first letter.

As is our policy, we've deleted the letter from the poster "Frank," along with some of the responses, not for the sentiments expressed -- Salon readers are free to be angry, disagreeable, and argue any position they like in our Letters to the Editor -- but for the abusive language directed at others. That's the line we're going to enforce here: take any position you want, argue as vociferously as you want, but we'll keep deleting letters that call others names, as best as we're able. It's a subjective call, we'll try to be consistent, we won't always get it perfect and we won't always be able to keep up. But that's our approach here.

The letter in question was deleted for advocating that a writer be shot.

We patrol these threads *very* liberally, and as you can see by the tons of critical and even borderline abusive letters we publish, we draw the line very loosely, but we do draw it somewhere. And yes, if you post a letter on Salon that says something like "why doesn't someone fucking shoot this writer" or whatever, you can be sure we will delete it, whatever else the letter says. That's the deal.

Thanks for pointing out the "Title IX" goof, Californian. We've corrected that now.

Yesterday I happened to see a window display on Solano Ave. of photos from a century ago showing the North Berkeley hills where I live in their pre-development splendor. On the one hand, I looked at them and marveled at their pristine state; on the other, I thought, gee, if they *hadn't* been developed, we'd never have the astonishing neighborhood that I call home today.

All of which is just to raise the question: development tends to look bad when we are viewing it from the comfort of our already-developed perches.

Which is not to say that I disagree with the goals of your ride, of which I am a proud sponsor! Hope it's going marvelously.

To further complicate matters, in Blake's highly quirky personal inversion of the Christian mythos Satan was often a positive, liberating figure, rebelling for good reason against a stifling divine order. (This approach has been productively revived in our day by the amazing Philip Pullman.)

I think RSS gets you some of the way toward the kind of skimmability you want. The problem is that, for commercial reasons, most publications like the Times (and Salon) prefer to give you just hed and deck in their feeds. So you're skimming a headline list, where what you really want is hed, deck and the first 2-3 paragraphs (which is what you'd read if your eyes were scanning the paper page). This is about the level of summary Salon puts (used to put?) on its "non-premium" teaser pages. Put that much in an RSS feed and I think you'd have the ideal skimming mode. Because RSS has one big advantage over reading the dead-tree edition: it keeps track of what you've skimmed and what remains unskimmed...

Happy blogaversary, Andrew -- what a fine thing you've made of this beat.

Nice piece, Farhad. But I wonder whether 2007 will go down as "The year a smart tech writer could accurately sum up the year without mentioning Microsoft once"!

I share Beaker's lack of sympathy here. And your amusement, Andrew. But really, it's sort of bizarre -- what does Moody's do after it admits something like this? Is there any alternative to corporate seppuku? I mean, shouldn't they just close up shop?

Or do we need some sort of rating system that explicitly values transparency. If you're going to create financial instruments that are essentially impossible to understand or judge, well, you're free to do so -- but Moody's and the other enablers of the financial system should state, forthrightly, "We can't vouch for this stuff since we can't unravel it. Buy at your own risk."

Interesting parallel here to the way the NY Times lockup of its archives (in the old days) could be worked around by using the referrer codes from its RSS feeds. Aaron Swartz even built a lookup tool for old stories, so that if you were a blogger looking to link to an old NYT story and not have the link break, you could always find the permalink that worked.

The assumption the Journal is making, I imagine, is that the number of people who will become aware of and use such workarounds remains small enough, and the economic benefit from openness to the Web great enough, that the company simply doesn't mind.

But in the long term, such have-it-both-ways business models usually fall apart. The Times site is now wide open. I'll bet the Journal ends up there too. Unless the next bubble-bust cuts so badly into the open-Web revenue that people start to obsess on subscription revenue again...