Web Graveyard Update

I had recently mooted the concept of WebGraveyard.com, where your presence in the online world will forever be preserved, including your social networking profiles, blogs, etc.

If anyone is yet not convinced this is a great idea, check out Online-Funeral.

Online Funeral allows mourners to participate in the funeral ceremony via the Internet, and if their appointment book doesn’t have a free slot at that time, allows them to see the videos later, or even order CDs.

‘Virtual Tributes’ are nothing but a simple signing of a Guest Book. In contrast, our plan is to offer virtual memorials – full 3D replicas of what’s offered on Memorials.com.

Compared to our WebGraveyard.com, this is peanuts! There is no integration of the deceased person’s online life. In fact, Online Funeral just looks like a simple widget that we can add to WebGraveyard, no?

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April 9, 2009 – 8:53 PM | By Mahendra | Posted in blogging, culture, marketing, society, technology | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4)

4 Comments

  • Anonymous wrote:
    Apr 11, 2009 at 6:08 AM

    Hi,

    I have been fol­low­ing your blog for a while and it is def­i­nitely enter­tain­ing. For the sake of my pri­vacy and con­cern for those around me I am leav­ing behind an anony­mous comment.

    I thought that Web Grave­yard is a really good idea. As social net­works etc. spread into com­mon life, it would be worth­while to let peo­ple know about ones demise.

    How­ever, I have a totally oppos­ing view of life which I will explain below. You can treat it as a fea­ture request.

    I don’t flat­ter myself by think­ing that peo­ple are actu­ally going to care once I die (for a few days sure, but after a while — NO way). How­ever, it would be impor­tant to inform them about it. So I would like a ser­vice which would send an email to every­one in my address book, send every­one an SMS from my phone, change my sta­tus on var­i­ous social net­works etc. and then even­tu­ally delete all the infor­ma­tion and close all the accounts.

    At the moment, I have a list of accounts and pass­words pinned to my will and instruc­tions for my sis­ter on how to do all this manually.

    I like in the Hindu way of cre­mat­ing and not leav­ing behind any­thing. I don’t want to leave behind a dig­i­tal foot­print either.

    Anony­mous

  • J T Stone wrote:
    May 5, 2009 at 9:38 AM

    This is just an ongo­ing tes­ta­mony to how life and death has changed beca­sue of the internet.

    I know my life is for­ever changed.

  • Richard wrote:
    May 26, 2009 at 6:49 PM

    Nice blog post, a good read, i’ll be book­mark­ing this.

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Apr 11, 2009 at 6:36 PM

    Dear Anony­mous, thank you for your kind com­ments and feedback!

    Your fea­ture request is not oppos­ing at all really. My post was sim­ply mar­ket­ing lingo, but if such a site were to be devel­oped, the fea­tures you request would be an inte­gral part of Web Grave­yard. We are already so con­cerned about our pri­vacy in the dig­i­tal world — what you’ve described sim­ply extends the online pri­vacy con­cept to what hap­pens after we die.

    I very much like the way you’ve described it — not leav­ing behind a dig­i­tal foot­print. But I think there is more to it than appears at first glance. The Hindu way of cre­ma­tion refers to the destruc­tion of our phys­i­cal exis­tence, not the destruc­tion of our cre­ative work, our knowl­edge, and phi­los­o­phy. While our dig­i­tal lives may com­prise of sev­eral online arti­facts of our phys­i­cal per­sona and per­sonal affairs, they may also include cre­ative and intel­lec­tual work in many arts and sci­ences. Are you sure you would like to destroy these as well?

    When I see how Indi­ans are proud of their ancient philo­soph­i­cal wis­dom and sci­en­tific knowl­edge in San­skrit and the Vedas but are des­per­ately cling­ing to a few frag­ments of the orig­i­nal man­u­scripts, I real­ize how impor­tant it would be for pre­serv­ing what we have today in the dig­i­tal world.

    It’s good that you have thought about all this and actu­ally pre­pared for it. Few, very few peo­ple do so, espe­cially those who are not yet of the ripe old age.

    Thanks for com­ment­ing and I hope you con­tinue to enjoy this blog. I enjoyed your com­ment! :-)