Pieces of dead people are going to persist more and more on the net. The pieces will become more and more interactive and eventually dead people will outnumber living people on the net.

Sounds strange, but that's the trend.

But technology may not wait for human protocols to catch up. It would be very easy, for instance, for me to write a program that visited various forums and posted jokes. This bot could run in the cloud. In fact, people are already doing similar things.

Right now it's just static content, and content owned by one service, so we can look to that service for some kind of decorum. But as more computational power gets controlled by individuals, this content will become more dynamic and more fluid. Then it's kind of hard to know whom to, er, blame.

I can't physically get to a funeral for everyone I now know. And that's too bad, because funerals are good for people. You need a way to memorialize someone, preferably by gathering in a place, and preferably with a strong ritual component, like the lighting of candles or the gathering around a gravesite or the recitation of formal prayers or sayings.

(Because ritual, among other things, is what we do when we want to say something heartfelt but unoriginal. It's unfair to force someone who has lost a friend to write a standalone obituary on a blog. There are a lot more mourners in the world than writers, you want to be able to mourn for people that you don't know well enough to memorialize in prose, and writing public statements of memorial is often not self-effacing enough. Your real desire is to call attention to your deceased friend, so it seems unseemly to risk calling attention to oneself instead.)

Good for Facebook for figuring a lot of this out. But there will need to be more of this, because you're right: The web, and our network of acquaintances on that web, is going to outlive us all.

It's strange and touching that a site intended to discuss urban issues might also serve as a de facto online memorial, but there you have it: people will find their own uses for any reasonably open system.

I could see myself wanting to go back and read through a deceased friend's online history, just to remember.

If you did explain it, the explanation might well sound like a post hoc rationalization. Which is okay. Writing, especially about the dead, is more art than science.

I'm willing to give the editors the benefit of the doubt. They've seen more Facebook pages of the deceased than I have.

I would imagine most families would want to keep the deceased's status messages, but not all of them (in cases of suicide, for example, as riklomas pointed out).

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1522294/how_to_quit...

and shared log-in information with immediate family members, so that we can decide what stays up and what gets deleted if one of us dies.

Based on other Internet businesses I have dealt with over the years, I think it is a lot more likely that my Facebook info will be permanently lost than that I will die while Facebook is still a going business, but I could be wrong.

When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an obituary or news article.

So, gothic entrepreneurs [1], here's a startup business case for you: Figure out how to run the business which provides the service that newspaper obits provide. [2] Because the newspapers aren't going to be around to do it for much longer.

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[1] Only tasteful gothic entrepreneurs, please. Working with this idea is going to require a very careful touch.

[2] Obituaries cost a lot to publish -- well north of a hundred dollars -- and I was going to rant about that, but then it occurred to me that (at least in theory) a newspaper needs to fact-check an obit before sending it to press. This is presumably why entities like Facebook accept the validity of a newspaper obit. So you have to pay a fact-checker, and they don't work for free.

Having said that, it's hard to believe that a web-based business can't underprice a dead-trees newspaper in the factchecking business. But there will be problems: Local newspapers have a legal status that your website won't have, at least not for a while. One wonders how many paper copies of something one has to print and circulate in a region before it counts as a "newspaper". Or whether alternative newsweeklies would accept a small additional source of revenue by agreeing to publish your company's syndicated obits.

I just finished reading Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers. It's written by three obituarists, for obituarists. (I'm not a journalist or an obituarist.) It's not officially out of print, but the publisher has none on hand and I had to check it out of the library.

It's about the business and practice of the obituary desk. It addresses fact checking, the peculiar difficulties of fact checking with grieving relatives, and the minor disasters that arise from leaving that out. Fascinating book, a peek into a job we probably don't think about.

On that grim note, I can also recommend Obit by Jim Sheeler, one of the co-authors of Death Beat. It's a collection of some of his best obituaries. He wrote for the Denver Post and the recently deceased Rocky Mountain news, among others.

"Fred changed his status from Living to Dead!"

And, though I have met quite a few people who have lost friends and family members, I don't recall anyone whose response to losing a loved one was to destroy all the mementoes. One is far more likely to cherish them.

His response was "I like thinking in the long-term, but not that long-term". Anyone else get the impression that this is a compromise?