There is hypocrisy in every law.

We teach our kids right and wrong... at what point do we teach them how far they can push the law?

Do you drive the speed limit or 7 over? Sure it's a small thing... but do these 'small things' add up?

Without those 5,000 college students there wouldn't be the thugs that you suggested are the ones that get busted.

Yeah, but if it was legal, they'd probably just grow their own, or buy it at a supermarket, thus cutting out the whole "thug" issue.

Here's what you touch on that drives me batty in exactly the way you mention-- They have NO CONCEPT of such footage staying with them.

If i find that footage linkable through youtube, search engines, etc, while researching an interview candidate. Yeah-- bye bye.

Managing one's community/world perception should be top fodder for classes in college-- where your learning that you are responsible for far more than your crazy (questionable) habits.

If you think that event was impressive, the City of Austin 'allows' a similar party called "Eeyore's Birthday" held on on the last Saturday of April every year. While dedicated to the birthday of the "Winnie the Pooh" character Eeyore, drug use is rampant. Then again with ~10k people present, I didn't see a single fight - hard to say the same thing about about a civilized entertainment event - like baseball isn't it...

in response to Izzy, I have to say you're being naive. These are children who have grown up in the digital age. They've had online dramas occur due to chat room brawls in their middle school years. Many of them know their google rating or their number of friends in Myspace. And honestly, you can't be online in a community for more than 15 minutes before someone half-way around the world finds you and friends you.

And while your threat of researching people online is footage is interesting, it's also hilarious. Footage is so hard to scan for information that google can't find a way to monetize it yet. For you to brag that you'll not hire people who show up in this footage is such an empty threat that it makes you look silly.

Well, DW, (interesting choice of handle, btw)

Your arguments, while possibly true, still do not account for the fact that those "digital" youth are probably not going to be interviewing and potentially hired by their fellow digital peers for at least another 10 years, for the most part.

So that footage of smoking up or any other ill thought of public displays of illegal or questionable activities, if found, could have a detrimental effect on potential employers views of them come time for hiring. Sure, the footage probably won't be found, but if you are job hunting in a recession, do you really want a flame war from 3 years ago to be the reason you didn't get that job?

Just because the habits are ubiquitous to them, doesn't make them right. Our society is not as open minded at this point as many in the small and shallow pool of the social networking industry would like to believe. We still have quite a ways to go before these sorts of "live and let live" ideologies pervade into the general publics minds, let alone a corporate or even liberal business framework.

So, go on and keep fighting for more open-mindedness in our various societies, but let's all be realistic with how niche these habits still are.

Well, if Naive means that I was wrong for researching and choosing to NOT hire past candidates for jobs who (in a few cases) chose to publicly support behaviors that did not align with the goals and objectives laid forth by a company that understands how sensitive it is to work with children in the online space... then naive I will be.

Perhaps you are right. In many cases-- it's hard to find the right youtube video that would make me want to hire/fire an employee. But as community tech moves forward, so will others-- like search engines and background research companies.

In one of the cases of candidates I opted not to hire-- a candidate connected to me through LinkedIn, on the linkedin page was a link to his blog, on his blog was a link to his journal, and in that journal was plenty of inappropriate conduct about luring and sexuality that made him a less than choice candidate to work with children in the online space. So... sometimes things have fast ways of bubbling up.

So, naive, silly-- that's your opinion. But to the parents of the children I house in my communities... I don't think they'd be so harsh to judge and insult someone who protected the best interest of their children.

And I'm sure there are companies who feel similarly who do not work with children.