Thursday, January 06, 2011

Your Digital Afterlife


The Library of Congress claims to be archiving all the Twitter posts, but how will your loved ones handle your digital remains? If you want to make sure your digital legacy is handled according to your desires, then perhaps it's time now to start digital estate planning.

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One estimate pegs the number of U.S. Facebook users who die annually at something like 375,000. Academics have begun to explore the subject (how does this change the way we remember and grieve?), social-media consultants have begun to talk about it (what are the legal implications?) and entrepreneurs are trying to build whole new businesses around digital-afterlife management (is there a profit opportunity here?). Evan Carroll and John Romano, interaction-design experts in Raleigh, N.C., who run a site called TheDigitalBeyond.com, have just published a tips-and-planning book, “Your Digital Afterlife,” with advice about such matters as appointing a “digital executor.”

And as previously mentioned here - The E-Tomb.

If you've got a wide range of personal videos, photos, tweets, emails, and online writings, would you like a construct created which could speak for you and which others could converse with after your flesh has shambled off the organic stage? Soon, there will be an app for that.

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