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Author Archive | Evan Carroll

We've discussed several times the value of the past, that desire to know more about those who came before you.  And we've postulated that the digital age presents an opportunity for individuals to be known by future generations through their online postings.  Preservation issues aside, this raises the question of identity.  Is an online persona an accurate reflection of and individual?

Online Identity

We’ve discussed several times the value of the past, that desire to know more about those who came before you. And we’ve postulated that the digital age presents an opportunity for individuals to be known by future generations through their online postings. Preservation issues aside, this raises the question of identity. Is an online persona […]

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Your Online Persona

Your Online Persona

How does the Internet see you? It’s an odd question, but some folks from the MIT Media Lab are thinking about just that. The project is Personas, a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit. From the project’s Web site: It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated […]

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Stages of the Digital Afterlife

Stages of the Digital Afterlife

When researching the various services that deal with the digital afterlife, a certain pattern started to emerge.  I call this pattern the three stages of the digital afterlife: missed, remembered, forgotten.  I’ll address each in that order, naturally. Missed This is the stage that occurs right after death.  You’ve left a void and your survivors […]

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South by Southwest 2010

South by Southwest 2010

John and I make no bones about how we came to start a blog about the digital afterlife. We pitched the idea for a panel talking about this for the 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival. After its selection as a core conversation, we devoted ourselves to study the topic in preparation for the event. The response […]

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Selecting a Digital Executor

Selecting a Digital Executor

With all of the conversation surrounding the digital afterlife, one thing is certain: you can’t deal with it by yourself.  You need a person or a service to help you. Services are popping up left and right, just check our (hopefully) comprehensive list. Still, for some things, you really need someone to help you out.  […]

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A legal perspective

A legal perspective

A recent article from Law Vibe provided some advice regarding the legal considerations for digital estate planning. The article recognized the law’s lack of precedence for digital assets and provided some insight about different types of online content like email, blogs and social networking profiles. As we’ve discussed before, there are two issues at play: […]

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Norton Online Living Calculator

Norton Online Living Calculator

According to CNET, Symantec is launching its Norton Online Living Calculator today, designed to determine the black market value of your online assets. The calculator asks questions about online finance, social networking and email accounts. The output is an estimated value of your personal information, which is substantially less than I imagined.  Mine was $10.59 […]

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Twitter device confirms you are alive

Twitter device confirms you are alive

Seen today on CrunchGear and Gizmodo, this Japanese-developed device sends Tweets about your heartbeat. Despite scaring your relatives when Twitter is down, this device could lead the way for a “is ___ dead” service with a yes/no/unsure API. While this adds some biological fact to confirming one’s death, there’s several kinks like hospitalization or disconnected […]

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