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.

Greetings from Austin, TX and the Samsung SXSW Blogger Lounge. Our team from The Digital Beyond along with Dazza Greenwood (CIVICS.com), Adele McAlear (DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com) and Jesse Davis (Entrustet.com) presented a successful panel yesterday morning, You’re Dead. Your Data Isn’t. What Happens Now?

There were several recordings made of the presentation, but most of them aren’t ready yet. But for now, we’ve got a few summaries for you. Update: Audio recording is available below.

Who Owns Your Web Stuff After You Die? Good Question By Giles Turnbull for Time’s Techland

Audio recording from SXSW

Graphic notes from ImageThink

Ustream recording from Dazza Greenwood

Note: The audio begins a few minutes into the video.

Prezi presentation from the panelists

Tomorrow the team from The Digital Beyond will take to the SXSW Interactive stage to present “You’re Dead. Your Data Isn’t. What Happens Now?” Before the session, we wanted to provide you with two quick previews. Two of our co-panelists took a moment to share with us on camera. Enjoy!

Adele McAlear

John Romano and Dazza Greenwood

I’m fresh back from San Francisco and the Internet Archive where I spent two days with many of the leaders in digital archives and preservation. Lots of great presentations and hallway conversations. I also presented my own take on design principles that should be considered when building archives to be used as memorials to the deceased.

I missed the lightning talks on Thursday evening, but I did see the conversation sparked between Jonathan Good and the 1000Memories team at Jason Scott from Archive Team. Archive Team recently saved some 900 GB of GeoCities data before Yahoo shut the service down. At Jason’s urging the 1000Memories team added export functionality to their product over night to overcome criticism regarding portable data.

Here’s a clip of the Twitter conversation:

My takeaway from all of this start ups should build upon the experience of researchers when designing their products. It’s always a good idea to avoid reinventing the wheel and researchers tend to have insight, design patterns, formats and standards in place that can be extremely helpful to a startup.

Over then last several months our exploration of the digital afterlife has pulled me back to my roots as an information scientist. Information what? Information scientist—people who study information, people and technology. Kind of like a librarian of the digital age. This week I’ll present a talk at the Internet Archive during Personal Digital Archiving 2011 called “Personal Digital Archives and the Death Transition.”

Personal digital archives are the shoe boxes, file folders and cabinets of the digital age. They’re more than a content repository. They’re a gestalt—a rich reflection of the curator’s identity.

The information architect in me wants to talk about how they should be organized and how we can better educate individuals in the care of their collections. But the bigger question, at least in my mind, is how can we design these archives for identity preservation?

Several studies on passing possessions on before death indicate that it’s done as an act of identity preservation. If you’ve ever been given a family memento, you have probably experienced this. I bet grandma said something like, “this is your grandfather’s watch that he wore for 30 years.” She may have gone on to say something like, “I remember that he looked at this watch constantly while we were in the waiting room when you were born.” Now this is more than a watch. It’s an object imbued with meaning. It has the ability to remind you of your grandparents and is thus an object of identity preservation.

That begs the question: how can we imbue digital objects with meaning? How can we design personal archives so that a lifetime of digital content can be accessible and meaningful to future generations?

I wish I had the answer. But in a later post I’ll provide my thoughts on the goals we should adopt for designing personal digital archives to meet this challenge.

Photo by dolescum on Flickr.

2010 was a big year for The Digital Beyond. Before I make any predictions for 2011, let’s review 2010. Here’s a timeline of our significant events, posts and other happenings for the year.

1/3/2010: Evan and John met to make plans for 2010. This is when we started looking for a publisher for our book idea.

1/15/2010: We published Digital afterlife predictions for 2010, our most popular post of 2010.

2/26/2010: New Riders Press extended us an offer to write Your Digital Afterlife.

3/3/2010: Evan speaks at Ignite Raleigh.

3/16/2010: John and Evan moderate the core conversation Become Immortal: Understanding the Digital After Life at SXSW

5/20/2010: Evan attended the first Digital Death Day in Mountain View.

6/3/2010: The Digital Beyond was mentioned in Obit Magazine.

6/29/2010: Evan is quoted in a Techlicious article, What Happens to Your Online Accounts When You Die?

8/9/2010: Twitter announced a policy for deceased user’s profiles. Our response was the 2nd most popular post of 2010.

10/6/2010: Facebook announced that profile information and media are now available for download. The Digital Beyond provides an analysis.

11/17/2010: Your Digital Afterlife was released and began shipping.

12/21/2010: John published So what *does* happen to your digital assets after you die? and became our 4th most popular post of 2010.

We’ve received lots of interest from the funeral profession regarding digital estate planning. It’s a natural fit, but until I talked with Ryan Thogmartin from ConnectingDirectors.com, I wasn’t quite sure how we could help funeral directors. Unfortunate it may be, but it might be too late to secure the digital possessions belonging to their clientele. In our discussion Ryan and I brainstormed ways that funeral professionals could raise digital estate planning issues within their community. Here are a few ideas:

Include information in pre-need planning

Pre-need planning is a great opportunity to talk with individuals about their estate plans digital and otherwise. In fact, according to a Lawyers.com study released in February, 2010 only 35% of Americans report having a will. I’m certain far less have considered their digital possessions.

Provide advice to family members

Funeral homes often prepare tribute videos and other remembrance items that require photos. At this stage funeral professionals could provide advice to family members for how to access the digital files of the deceased. This could be accessing photos stored locally on a computer or on sites like Flickr and Facebook. Of course, this is a bit after-the-fact, but there’s an opportunity to help guide them through finding and securing these assets.

Be an advocate in your community

Funeral professionals are often well connected and respected in their communities. Whether its speaking, writing or simply bringing up the topic when the occasion is right, there’s an opportunity here to raise awareness about this issue amongst those who may not have considered it before.

These are just a few ideas we discussed during our call. If you think of others, please leave them in the comments.

Photo by MudflapDC

Shortly after Your Digital Afterlife went to press in October my grandmother passed away at 83. I was fortunate to spend much of her final week at her bedside. In the days that followed her passing I experienced digital legacy first hand. So in the spirit of our book, and in her memory, allow me to share those with you.

Mable Hewett - 1927-2010

As we were preparing for Grandma’s funeral my Mother stopped by my childhood bedroom, in which I had set up a makeshift office for the week. She said, “Now there’s one person who didn’t have a digital legacy to worry about.” I thought for a moment, suspecting she was correct, but then glanced down at my computer screen and responded, “Have you been on Facebook today?”

It occurred to me that the my wall and those of several family members contained an outpouring of support from friends. Many of the people who never even knew my Grandmother. Facebook was where I had turned the previous evening to tell my friends of the sad news. Their support was unbelievably valuable to me and, at least in some small way, a part of my Grandmother’s legacy. I have to wonder if Facebook posts and emails will someday become the replacement for cards and flowers. I suspect that we’ll have both and that both will be equally as meaningful in the grieving process. I know it was for me.

Later that day we began preparing photos to submit to the funeral home for a tribute slide show. Mom pulled out several boxes of photos and we began to go through them. It was a great trip down memory lane and when it was finished I said “I’ve got more.” I opened up iPhoto and began to look through photos from Grandma’s birthday party, just three weeks earlier, and from countless other family events. My sister looked through Facebook at the same time. We compiled the photos into a new album and I fetched a USB drive that we could put them on and send to the funeral home. I also took a moment to teach my aunt how to email photos from her BlackBerry and she contributed a few. Meanwhile my Mother found a printed photo of my Grandmother and her brothers and sisters and said, “Evan, you took this one.” Not finding it on my MacBook I found a book of old CD-R discs and pulled out one labeled “Backup Spring 2003.” I didn’t find the photo she mentioned, in fact I never did, but I did find several others that we added to the album. As I placed the files on the USB drive, I started to think about how we compiled all of these photos. Some of them came from my hard drive, others from Facebook, CDs and even a mobile phone.

For someone who barely understood what we were doing on “that computer” all of the time, we compiled an impressive set of digital memories. And if it wasn’t for the need to submit photos for this slide show, they may have never come together in one place. I’ve opened that iPhoto album several times since that day and it’s availability to me at all times right here on my laptop is comforting. It’s a place I can go to remember and honor her.

So this post is for you, Grandma. While you didn’t have any digital things of your own, our photos and messages are a very important part of your legacy. We treasure them deeply and I hope that others realize the importance of their digital things through this story.