How to Create a Personal Legacy Online

Now that summer is over*, let's talk about death.

Sound grim? Not from this perspective. I'm interested in how the web can help create legacies.

Evolution of Life's Questions

As I understand it, people tend to work through the following questions throughout their life:

1. Just about every child gets around to asking their parents, "Where Did I Come From?"

2. By the time people become adults, they've usually found an answer to the first question and move onto, "Why am I the person that I am?" One of the ways they try to answer this question is by looking to their parents for genetic traits that have been passed down to them.

3. As people near death, the question changes to, "Will I Be Remembered?"

I'm interested in how the web can help enable #3. How can technology be used to help people build a legacy.

A few ideas come to mind:

1. Personal histories: create a blog that can live forever so future generations can learn about you through your writing.

2. Video: share your life's stories on video and publish them to the web.

3. Contribute knowledge: Share knowledge you've gained over your life with collaborative history projects like Wikipedia. Don't take your knowledge with you.

What would you add to this list?

*In Minnesota, summer ends when the state fair is over and kids go back to school on the day after Labor Day.

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