Mathew Ingram ponders the web ephemera left after people pass on:

In some ways, the blog entries and other online ephemera from people like Mark Hoekstra are more affecting than the deaths of famous people like author David Foster Wallace -- or even journalists like Leroy Sievers — whose passing generates a certain amount of heat and light on the Web as a result of their public presence. What happens to Mark’s blog posts or photos or Last.fm recommendations after his death? Will traces of him be left for others to find, and for how long?

This reminded me of somthing I read in "A Distant Mirror". Back then, people who were wealthy enough would leave an endowment to the local church, to make sure that prayers were said for them "in perpetuity". I wondered when I read that: just how long did those prayers get read? Did they age off eventually, or did a social upheaval (the plague, French Revolution, something else) put a stop to it?

I've been in religious services where I hear an echo of this - the names of congregants who died in the same month have their names read off, as a way of remembering them. How long does that go on?

Web trails are newer technology, and they allow us as individuals to leave some traces behind - so long as our servers keep running, anyway. This blog server is something I wrote, so it's longevity after I'm gone is very open to question - but heck, who knows how long things like WordPress and Blogger will survive? In some sense, our online traces are a lot like those medieval prayers - a cry thrown up against the dark that will last for some undefined period of time.