Teen blogger charged with murder

STLpunk.com is a perfectly respectable blogging service for punk rock fans that last summer reached the million-visitors-a-month mark, but now its creator, Jerome Gaynor finds himself saying about posts in the site: "I'm completely shocked and depressed about where things have gone…. There are certain things - threats, excessive obscenity, advocating racial violence, disgusting insults against dead children - that simply cannot be tolerated. I am going to make it easier to report and remove things like this. I now need to figure out how to … make some time to restructure the juggernaut of teen mayhem that this corny little website has become." One reason why Jerome posted that on his service's home page is because of a 17-year-old St. Louis boy "whose blog on STLpunk.com came to light last week after he was charged with the murder of classmate Erin Mace, 16, of Fenton [Mo.]," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. Erin also had a blog at STLpunk.com, which linked to that of the boy charged with her murder, as did his to hers. "His entries painted a picture of loneliness and despair." The writer of this thoughtful, very thorough article talked with psychologists, police, and educators about how they view and handle this digital-age phenomenon - as a tool for teen venting, role-playing, self-validating, experimenting, threatening, soul-baring, and socializing, as well as for police work, counseling, and parenting. Articles like this are fuel for a very important discussion that needs to be going on wherever in the world teenagers are blogging. [Here's our latest feature on this, "A mom writes: Teen solicited in MySpace."]