Adam Ostrow, the editor-in-chief of Mashable, presented After your final status update last month at TED Global 2011. We’re pleased that the topic of digital legacy is getting attention on a respected, global stage. Adam mentions several services listed on our site, including 1000Memories and If I Die.

Adam’s vision for the potential future of interacting with our digital content as a true representation of self is exactly one of our reasons for advocating that users plan for the future of their digital content. I highly recommend that you take a five minutes and watch his presentation.

When I started researching the digital afterlife in 2008, I felt as if nobody was discussing the topic. We found a few posts here and there, but information on the topic was sparse. About a year ago I decided to take a look back and see what I could learn about the early days of death and the Internet.

I know from some of the early academic works that online memorials were present well before 1999 (I’ve heard some say as early as 1994). I wanted, however, to focus on milestones surrounding pre-planning, such as posthumous emails and digital estate planning. To keep this from being completely overwhelming, I’ve included only those events that were an industry first or unique in some way. Feel free to suggest additional dates.

Digital Afterlife Industry Timeline

You can’t spend much time thinking about your digital afterlife without considering personal archiving and how you’ll preserve your family mementos for future generations. In fact lot’s of people are working to help individuals do just that, including the Library of Congress and online services like 1000 Memories and Chronicle of Life. Today I stumbled upon a new website from the UK called Historypin. They’re in partnership with Google to create a visual history of the world. They’re asking website visitors to “pin” their history to the world by scanning those boxes of old photographs and placing them on the map. Essentially they’re adding latitude and longitude metadata to each image.

I’m extremely excited about this effort. While personal archives are important for your own legacy, I think there’s a much greater potential to be remembered in a sense by contributing your content to a project like this. It increases the likelihood that it will be cared for well into future generations and that more people will see and appreciate it.

Here’s a short video for you that explains more about Historypin.

I encourage you to visit the site and start scanning those photos. And while you’re at it, you should consider these scanning guidelines from the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress resources if you want an archival-quality result.

I’ve been on the road (and in the air) over the last few weeks to speak at the Library of Congress for the annual Federal Library and Information Center Committee Forum and on Beaver Island, MI for the annual meeting of the Michigan Archival Association. For both of these events I presented Preserving Personal Legacy in the Digital Age as a keynote speaker. In the presentation I talk about personal legacy and digital content’s role in identity preservation as the need for digital estate planning. I go on to talk about the services and laws that currently help us deal with digital assets at death and provide archivists a call to action to help design archiving solutions and educate the public.

After returning home, I recorded a version of the keynote for you and added it to Slideshare. You can view both of them below.

Following Digital Death Day John Romano interviewed Dazza Greenwood about the particulars of the White House’s new National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. They discussed the core parts of the strategy, how it will be implemented, what users can expect and the next steps for the project.

In a recent email to members Friendster, the social networking site first launched in 2002, announced that the majority of content on user profiles will be deleted on May 31st. They’ve made an application available to help users download this content. From the email:

“We are introducing a new and improved Friendster site in the coming weeks. As part of this change, we will remove a number of social networking functions in Friendster. This includes your existing accountprofile, photos, messages, blogs, and shoutouts. However, your list of friends will be preserved, along with your basic profile information.

We understand that your photos, blogs and other private data may be important to you. An application is available in the “Apps” section of the site, until May 31st 2011, to help you download or export them securely to third party sites, such as Flickr or Multiply. The application is available here.”

With respect to digital legacy this move has implications for users. For deceased users, without heirs who might have the username and password, their content will be deleted and heirs, even if they are willing, have no way to download the content automatically. From a greater standpoint, we’re set to lose some of the earliest social networking data. It’s likely that this content would be of interest to researchers in the future.

We encourage you to download your data if you’re a Friendster user and consider how you will archive that information. After all, it’s Preservation Week.

This week is the ALA’s Preservation Week. It’s an annual week of awareness of preservation for personal and shared collections. It’s also the perfect time for you to think about your personal collection, especially your digital files and what you’re doing to make sure they’re properly preserved and available for your family.

We highly recommend that you participate in two of the public webinars offered this week.

Accidents Happen: Protecting & Saving Family Treasures

Nancy E. Kraft
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
11 am Pacific, noon Mountain, 1 pm Central, 2 pm Eastern

Preserving Your Personal Digital Memories

Bill LeFurgy
Thursday, April 28, 2011
11am Pacific, noon Mountain, 1pm Central, 2pm Eastern

Nancy and Bill are sure to share valuable information for you during each of their hour-long sessions. If you’re up to it, you should also check out the other events that the ALA has planned for the week.

It’s that time of year again. The second Digital Death Day in North America is coming up May 6th in the San Francisco Bay Area. Are you excited? We definitely are. With all of the attention that the topic has received over the last few months, we’re anticipating a great event. John and I will be there and we’d love to see you there too.

The Details:
Digital Death Day
May 6th, 2011
San Francisco Bay Area (Venue TBD)
DigitalDeathDay.com

In our advice about planning your digital legacy, we talk at length about usernames, passwords and wishes. Leaving behind detailed instructions for accessing your online accounts can save your heirs a good deal of frustration. But this approach assumes that the service is still available when your heirs go looking. Moreover, it assumes that you’re willing to share access to an account. It seems perfectly reasonable that you might want to share the content, but not grant access. While we still think securely sharing your passwords is a good idea, it’s also important to archive copies of your content. When you create a copy, you’re almost doubling the chances that the content will continue to exist. To quote the saying from Library Science, LOCKSS: Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.

Making backup or archival copies is relatively easy when files are stored locally on your computer, but when they’re stored online at sites like Facebook and Twitter, things become a bit dicey. To help you through the various complexities of archiving your social media content, here are three resources you should check out.

Fast Company: How to Backup Your Social Media Life

Fast Company has a great article that covers Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Picasa Web Albums. It’s definitely worth checking out. In fact, I wanted to write an article just like this, but it’s much easier to give you a link.

Resources from Your Digital Afterlife

We put together a list of social media backup tools for our book, Your Digital Afterlife. We include tools for Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs.

Internet Archive: Archive-It

The Internet Archive has a subscription-based tool that can be used to create an archive copy of most any website, including social media sites. They have specific instructions for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Due to the complex setup and the HTML output, I would only recommend this option to advanced users.

My Approach

I’m primarily concerned with the content I have at Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. I periodically download all of my data from Facebook using their download feature. It delivers a nice set of HTML files that you can open in a web browser.

For Twitter, I’m quite fond of Tweetbook, which delivers PDF and XML downloads of your last 3,200 tweets. The limit is due to the Twitter API and is easily circumvented as long as you start making downloads before you reach the 3,200 mark. The most recent time I used Tweetbook, I did have to wait about 45 seconds for some users to log out of the site before I could use it. It seems that they’re limiting the number of active users to keep within the rate limits of the Twitter API.

Finally, I keep a local copy of everything I share on Flickr. In many respects, I consider Flickr to be a backup location for the photos I value most.

Once the Twitter and Facebook downloads are on my computer, they become a part of my regular backup process along with all of the photos I’m sharing on Flickr. After all, having more copies is usually better.

Thumbnail by dolescum on Flickr.

Today Entrustet announced a new service, the Entrustet Digital Property Search. Traditionally Entrustet has focused on pre-need digital estate planning services, but this announcement marks a shift in that focus as they add this new at-need offering. Essentially you can provide their automated system with the email addresses of the decedent, and their tool scours the Web for lost or forgotten accounts.

“Ever since we launched our Account Guardian service, we’ve gotten emails, blog comments and phone calls from families of recently deceased or estate planning lawyers going through probate,” said Nathan Lustig, co-founder of Entrustet. “They always asked us for help for their clients who didn’t preplan. After about the 10th call, we decided we really needed to do something and the Digital Property Report came out of it.”

This is only the second offering we’ve seen in this space for families of the deceased seeking to discover and access their online accounts. The other is Digital Estate Services, a New York-based company that’s essentially a locksmith for digital devices and online accounts.

The announcement cited the cast of a 42-year-old individual who passed away suddenly. The report generated “16 online accounts that otherwise would have been lost, including a business domain name that was set to expire in 30 days.”

The information is pulled solely from publicly-available sources. To avoid any security concern caused by aggregating this information, the report is only available to attorneys, family members or executors. The requester required to provide an obituary to Entrustet as proof of death.

From our perspective, this is a welcome service, especially considering that many executors are not technically savvy and unable to search for this information on their own. That said, our advice at The Digital Beyond is to tread carefully when exploring online accounts of the deceased, especially if their wishes are not clearly expressed.