Thursday, February 23, 2006

Jeff Jarvis on enabling community

Here’s some free advice for you from the creator of Entertainment Weekly, Media Guardian columnist, former president and creative director of Advance.net, Condé Nast’s online arm, and current consultant to The New York Times Company and others.

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…

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.

Unlike a lot of free advice, Jarvis’s is definitely worth more than what you’ve paid for it.