Recent Endorsements

You've left us really enthused about the whole digital dimension and we're looking forward to developing our plan with your support.
Simon Beardow - Deputy Director, British Council, Vietnam

Friday 12 November 2010

From The Strange But True File - Social Media Beyond The Grave

For the person who has it all; a solar powered headstone from E-Tomb that stores your online presence after you have shuffled off this mortal coil.


Visitors to your grave can use bluetooth to access the information and the system is solar powered so while the memories might fade, the batteries never will.

Barring a complete solar eclipse, friends and relatives can gather around and be reminded of your online life.   They can also uploading their anecdotes about you to the tombstone. Now this might be both a good and bad thing especially if one considers that history is made by those who write it, or in this case, uploads it.


While you may think this a morbid use of technology it is not exactly a completely new concept.

An RFID Memorial Tablet is sold by Objecs and according to Treehugger.com they sell their:

"Personal Rosetta Stone passive RFID-enabled data tags as an addition to a loved one's tomb stone - you can enter the person's name and choose some represetative symbols, perhaps a small epitaph via the web - then you embed the tag into a larger traditional tombstone"

But if all of above is a bit overwhelming you can try the simpler option provided by Facebook.  They were faced with the fact that from time to time a few of their 300 million members join the permanently departed.

Max Kelly in his Facebook blog explains how they have created the idea of "memorialized" profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who've passed.

"When an account is memorialized, we also set privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. We try to protect the deceased's privacy by removing sensitive information such as contact information and status updates. Memorializing an account also prevents anyone from logging into it in the future, while still enabling friends and family to leave posts on the profile Wall in remembrance."

The process is a simple one; there is an online form to fill in and alert the Facebook moderators.  When a profile has been memorialized, "sensitive" information, like phone numbers, are removed, and the profile is locked up to anyone who was not already a confirmed friend (non-friends can't find the profile in search queries, either).

However this service hasn't received universal acclamation and the best advice is to make sure your username and password is passed on to a close relative or acquaintance with your estate.  That way your Facebook profile can be added to by family members and not frozen by the company.

Meanwhile the designers of the E-Tomb, Huang Jianbo, Zhao Ting, Wang Yushan, Ran Xiangfei and Mo Ran, will be hoping that their hybrid tombstone / external hard-drive will bring them wealth in the material world.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Monday 8 November 2010

Good Advice On Making Online Videos



Patrick Starzan, the Vice President of Marketing of the popular comedy website Funny or Die, in an interview with WebProNews details some of the mistakes that people are making with video on the Web.

Visible Measures research found that 19.4 percent of online viewers abandon a video within the first 10 seconds and 44.1 percent of viewers abandon online video within the first 60 seconds.  Music videos were one of the worst categories as were those which were slow to get to their punch line.

The company researched 40 million videos in more than seven billion viewings to reach there conclusion.

The lesson to be learnt here is that no video should go unless until it is truly professional in content and production.

If you content is not engaging from the outset then you will not have a hope of capturing repeat visitation.



World's Largest Gummy Worm with a True Reach™  ranking of 817,220
Enhanced by Zemanta

TheDigitalConsultant Shop



Blog Archive