Do you want to 'own' murderers and their victims?

The story of a high schooler in Florida jailed over his MySpace lends credence to Jeff Jarvis’s argument that ‘owning’ an audience a la MySpace is not the way to go.

You don’t want to own community. First, because you can’t; the community owns the community. Second, because then you become responsible for all the community’s sins: See MySpace having to hire a safety czar who, presumably, will tell people not to be stupid enough to meet strangers and get murdered.

So what should other companies be trying to do?

What you do want to do is enable community. You want to leave control and responsibility at the edges — because that’s where it is anyway — and bring people together with information and each other. The web is the social application. The challenge is to find ways to bring people together in ways they couldn’t otherwise do themselves.