This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this. A company called Rosetta Stone (not the foreign language software) is offering QR code and NFC (near field communication, a technology based upon RFID) products for addition to headstones. The products from Rosetta Stone allow users to view a similar online memorial.

I have to ask, will the websites for these QR codes be around in 20 years time? The Web today is just 20 years old, and we don’t have much of the original Web left. While the technology has promise, I’d like to hear more about the preservation efforts for the digital half of the memorial.

What do you think? Do you want a QR code on your headstone?

• John Romano, The Digital Beyond
• Bill LeFurgy, Library of Congress
• Adam Ostrow, Mashable
• Adele McAlear, DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com and Edelman Digital

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Introducing the panelists:

The official description:

When you kick the bucket, you’ll leave behind a vast amount of digital information: a lifetime’s worth of Tweets, emails, blogs, photos, videos and more. They’re the product of a creative life well lived.

In fact, this information forms a rich archive of who we are and what we think. But in a world of passing technology, will our digital selves simply fade away as the victim of neglect? Or will they live on in perpetuity like the Great Pyramids to be remembered and celebrated?

Libraries frequently preserve the collections of the significant and famous, but what about the rest of us? Does technology hold the key to widespread digital preservation? Or should we just die and be dead?

As we think about the future of experiencing the past, how should we prepare? What technology will we need? And what will that mean for society? Join our group of archivists, technologists and interaction designers who are going to discuss the challenges and opportunities of a digitally preserved world.

Oh, we’ll have some great biological panelists, too. They’ll discuss artificial intelligence, digital avatars, and the future of identity. Along the way we’ll learn:

* Just how close we are to seeing self-aware, digital life forms
* How new AI technology might enhance our biological lives
* How digital avatars might keep living for you after you die

The singularity won’t be televised, folks. We’ll make sure you don’t miss it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.