It looks to me more like he's simply trying to change the group. Giving the nobody group permission to view the folder, so that the Apache web server can see the stuff in there. Of course, that's assumption, not necessarily close to being right. <br
If that is the case, I would suggest you use chgrp instead of chown, easier and gives a better error message (such as "You are not a part of the group nobody"). At least try this from the command line first, and see if that's what's causing the problem :-)