We’ve put together a guide to help you get your digital life in order in preparation for your death. It walks you through the general process that we recommend.

• List your assets
• Define your wishes
• Choose someone to execute your wishes
• And provide access and control to that person.

Download our digital-death-survival-guide, and get your life in order.

Lisa, the blogger at clusterfook.com, recently died of ovarian cancer. She blogged about the disease and dying of it. Rest n peace Lisa.

Her blog was important to her so she decided that she would hand it over to her friend, Secondhand Carl.

She made arrangements. Gave him access to the admin. Now he runs the blog and is posting obituaries and news about Lisa’s death. This kind of informal arrangement seems easiest and most personal. No need for lawyers or wills. Just a person’s wishes being carried out. Nice.

How many domain names do you have registered? I can think of at least five between mine and others I manage. If you were to pass before the registration expired, who would renew them? Remember that domain names aren’t property and you can’t really put them in your will. As I see it, and I’m not a lawyer mind you, there are two really simple options to protect them:

1. Set up a corporation, likely an LLC, and register your domain names through it. You can appoint a designee to take over the corporation and they’ll have relatively few issues gaining administrative control of your domains. In my opinion this plan is highly complicated, but is the most legally sound.

2. For those of us who don’t like to draw up legal documents in our spare time, allow me to suggest a more straightforward approach. First create a list of all of your registrars, DNS providers, hosting companies and the like. Record your usernames and passwords with this list. It’s important that you keep this list updated, by the way, because an old/expired password won’t be of much use. Now, dependent upon how much security you prefer you can either place this list in a secure location at home, or go and rent a safety deposit box at your local bank. Next appoint a technically minded designee whom you trust. Again dependent upon your security preferences, either provide them with the location of this list or specifically grant them the safety deposit box in your will. Make sure to set expectations with your designee and everything should go as planned.

I would suggest that you leave specific, written instructions with your designee. You may also be interested in providing messages for your online communities and friends that he could deliver on your behalf.

One thing you shouldn’t do is provide usernames and passwords in your will. It is a part of public record and can be viewed by anyone. Also, you should probably review your plans with your lawyer. As I said before, I’m not one and this information is provided as-is with no warranty expressed or implied. Feel free to use it as you wish, but my colleagues nor I are liable for any resulting damages.

So while mad scientists are busy making digital salvation possible, what can us mere mortals do to enable our digital footprint to outlive us? Well, in this lifetime I believe that people are going to start offering services that allow us to bundle up and archive our digital self.

If we think of that footprint as the total of all our online transactions (posts, comments, photos, videos, etc.) , then bundling up all the assets would provide a view of a person’s digital life.

Of course this issue is clouded by the very idea of ownership. Who owns a comment? Who owns the blog. For that matter, who really owns your Facebook or Flickr profile? You? Or the site? But regardless, the content is there. It’s accessible. It’s store-able.

The only question to consider is why?

We are at the beginning of a new age. Data storage gets cheaper by the day. It enables us to store incredible amounts of data. It is quite possible that whatever makes the leap to digital has a chance of remaining until the end of time.

I set out to investigate what might happen to my online identity if I were to pass away.  Here’s what a few online services say about the deceased in their terms of service.

Facebook
“When we are notified that a user has died, we will generally, but are not obligated to, keep the user’s account active under a special memorialized status for a period of time determined by us to allow other users to post and view comments.”

Yahoo (Flickr)
“No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted.”

MySpace
MySpace does not have an official policy in their terms of service, but I found the following in a CBS News article. “MySpace said in a statement it handles deceased members’ pages on a “case-by-case basis” and does not “allow anyone to assume control of a deceased user’s profile.” Profiles can be deleted if that’s requested by family members.”

Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Brightkite, ClaimID, del.icio.us and Pownce don’t seem to have anything formal in their terms.  So, in short, they aren’t obligated to do anything.  My digital identity might live on, or it might not.  What is it going to take to bring this issue to the forefront and force the proprietors of the social web to address it?  I suppose only time will tell.

Re-posted from Field Notes