THE UPROAR IN the blogosphere over San Francisco's alleged attempt to regulate political Internet communications turned out to be mostly a tempest in a teapot: as Matthew Hirsch reports on page 13, the legislation in question has already been amended and will not in any way limit or control online journalists. In fact, even its opponents now agree that the city's campaign laws will, for the first time, officially acknowledge that bloggers should be treated the same as traditional media.

But there's an important (and difficult) message here for local, state, and national government agencies that are looking at ways to deal with this uncontrolled – and probably uncontrollable – new form of political speech.

The legislation came in the wake of last year's vicious – and anonymous – attack ads targeting Sups. Gerardo Sandoval and Jake McGoldrick. The mailers were over-the-top ugly – one even suggested that Sandoval was a Nazi sympathizer – but it was impossible to figure out who paid for and distributed them. That's unacceptable, and the Board of Supervisors is right to close that loophole and require full disclosure of the funding for any political ad sent within 90 days of an election.

This is, of course, by its very nature tricky: if interpreted badly, the law could, for example, force a grassroots tenant advocacy group to disclose every one of its members and their contributions if it sends out a mailing urging people to lobby for better rent-control laws during an election season. But that's clearly not the intent of the legislation, and the city should write implementation regulations that aim at the right targets: ads by anonymous or hard-to-track groups that are clearly aimed at supporting or attacking a political candidate during election season.

In the process of regulating these sometimes sleazy ads, the supervisors ran into a complex issue that is only going to get more important in the next few years: the role of blogs in politics. One of the main online critics of the law – Michael Bassik, whose blog item helped set off the furor that led to the amendments – happens to work for a political consulting firm that has San Francisco clients. He's also (like a lot of people in politics these days) a blogger – and he says that, in his online role, he should be treated as a legitimate journalist.

That may be a stretch – but it's a murky area, at best, and one that, for now at least, the government ought to stay out of. Clearly, some bloggers are legitimate journalists. Some are mostly gossip hounds who publish without fact-checking or a concern for truth. Some are political activists who are openly pushing an ideological agenda. Some are, in whole or in part, operatives of political parties, candidates, or consulting firms.

But the same was true of many newspapers not all that long ago. The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, started off as a dubious theater gossip rag (and has matured a bit since then). And eventually, it will all shake out: the blogs that do real reporting and offer trustworthy news and intelligent opinions will survive as the credible news outlets of tomorrow, and the others will either vanish or find their own, different niches. And if it turns out that the political consultants of the world figure out how to manipulate the blogosphere in some horrible way that creates a need for regulation, it can be addressed then.

The bottom line is that the First Amendment was written in an era of pamphleteers like Tom Paine and was designed to encourage a large, seething, unruly marketplace of ideas. That's exactly what the blogging world has become. Any government interference in that world should be done openly, with the utmost caution, under the strictest constitutional standards. For now, San Francisco – and California, and the federal government – should leave the bloggers alone.