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 […]
Take a look into the terms of service for various sites like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail.
A new service has launched called Virtual Eternity that promises to create an “intelligent” avatar that can live on after you die. The avatar would look like you, sound like you, and respond to questions just like you do. And it could live on indefinitely after you are gone. The site, virtualeternity.com, allows you to […]
In January I made a few predictions about digital afterlife trends for 2010. In that post I cited a prediction by TrendWatching.com that “profile myning” would be a crucial trend to watch in 2010. “Profile myning” is an intentional word play on profile mining, the process of extracting patterns and thus business intelligence from social […]
Twitter recently announced its policy for handling the accounts of deceased users. Before I get into my thoughts about the policy, Kudos to them. They’re ahead of the many social websites that do not have any stated policy. It’s also worth stating that there’s a pattern here. Facebook created the memorialized profile around the same […]
It happens. Computers left behind by a loved one become locked boxes. Accounts become frozen. Treasured digital assets are lost. Now a new service is available that helps survivors unlock digital content. Digital Estate Services (http://www.digitalestateservices.com) is here to help. Their service can help unlock local files, recover user names and passwords for online accounts, […]
We are beginning to see the digitization of cemeteries. Learn about the first company to sell a enhanced memorial product (a digital headstone).
The British Library recently launched the UK Web Archive, a repository designed to archive UK Web sites for posterity. Their site states that it “contains sites that reflect the rich diversity of lives and interests throughout the UK.” The archive presently contains approximately 6,000 Web sites and users can nominate sites for inclusion. In the […]
While doing some research recently, I started to think more about the fields of study that together form a foundation for the digital afterlife. I have always maintained that this is a multi-faceted topic, but I didn’t realize how true that statement was. Identity – online content is a projection of our identity into the […]
What do you want to happen to your Facebook profile after you die?
