What Happens When Nerds Die?

I have to admit that, while I’ve experienced the passing of several family members and close friends in my life, I’ve never been at the elbows of the “what are we going to do with their stuff” discussion. I always assumed it was something that you’d fork over a pile of cash to a probate attorney and have it sorted out for you, but now that I’m starting to resemble a grown-up, I doubt it’s that simple.

Though she’s the prettiest girl ever and the sharpest knife in any drawer I’ve ever opened, my wife isn’t a tech dork like myself. She uses the computer the way most folks do and is very adept at learning new technical things, but she’s not a power user. I, on the other hand, have my left my digital mark all over the frickin’ Internet in the form of blog posts, photos and 140-character turds. While I don’t honestly believe that curating my digital life once I’m worm food would be a task to benefit the whole of humanity, I’m sure that my family and close friends wouldn’t mind reminiscing over a few old blog posts and crappy Twitter jokes.

Let’s play “what if Brett gets hit by a bus?”. Assuming I buy the farm in the next couple of hours, my family is going to have a hell of a job on their hands if they want to somehow collect everything I’ve done online. I don’t want this to be the case, so I’m formulating a plan that should make this process relatively painless. Most of the meaningful content that I produce online falls into one of the following categories:

• Writings (blog posts, essays, etc.)
• Images (photos and the like)
• Conversations (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed)

Rather than painstakingly typing up all of the various logins, export instructions and other gotchas that would be involved in collecting all of this, it would be much more pleasant if I were to maintain a list of all of the sites I would like recovered, along with login credentials, and hand it over to a trusted individual. This person would know how to easily collect all of my stuff using only that list of information and provide it to my family in a human-readable format. Kind of like having an Executor of my Digital Estate. I don’t know about you, but this sounds a lot more attractive than handing the same list to my wife and wishing her good luck.

For all of the nerdy types reading this, I’m sure a couple of names have already popped into your head as possible candidates for the role of your Digital Executor. The fact is that, even for the most fluttery of social Internet butterflies, putting together a list of your various home bases and outposts along with the login information used to get access shouldn’t take you more than a couple of hours. Why not make that a goal for this week? Here’s a little trigger list to help you make your list (not comprehensive, but it should get you thinking):

• Blogs
• Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.)
• Photos (Flickr, etc.)
• Mailing lists or Newsgroups
• Digital Archive or Backup Solutions (Evernote, Amazon S3, any simple FTP site where you keep stuff)

You get the picture – just think about it a little bit and hitting the major points shouldn’t take you too long at all.

I don’t mean to get all macabre on such a lovely winter’s day, but since so much of what I do and say lives in “the cloud”, I think that a simple process like this will make your (hopefully not untimely) passing a tiny bit easier to handle.

This post was inspired by Garrick Van Buren and Patrick Rhone

Tagged as: blogging, death, facebook, friendfeed, Technology, twitter