I think this one has legs...and don't worry...I'm not going anywhere. Sometimes, I think about what might happen to my digital presence when I'm gone. Sometimes, people's blogs and MySpace pages become comment section shrines, only because that's the only thing the public has access to.
In my case, at some point, my Typepad subscription and domain registration would expire, and my blog might disappear.
Now, lucky for me, I know a couple of folks over at 6A and so if news of my unfortunate demise reverberated throughout the blogosphere, I hope they might be nice enough to make my blog a freebie.
But then what of my email buddies, Twitter friends, and friends across various social networks? How would many of them even know I was gone? That's prob a big issue. Many of my digital friends, like all those dozens of prospective Match dates waiting in my inbox, wouldn't even know I was dead.
Enter Digital Plot. Digital Plot would enable you to carry out a very specific set of intructions to be carried out for your digital world when you pass.
So, here's how it would work... You sign up and give us all your respective passwords..the keys to your kingdom. For each place, you tell us what to do. Maybe you want a mass email to go out to all your gmail contacts, one that you write up and store at Digital Plot. Maybe it points people to your blog, where you've instructed us to post a YouTube video that you prerecorded and saved privately via our site.
Or maybe you want the whole thing slashed and burned...immediate termination of all your digital content.
Or an archive of it to be stored on CD/DVD and mailed to your friends.
Or maybe you just want something simple...send my universal password to my friend by email and let the digital executor carry out my wishes.
The business model would work the same was as a cemetery actually...its just like an investment fund. You pay us a discounted amount of the money we'll need to carry out your wishes in perpetuity, like maintaining your blog and we make money by investing those funds hoping that you don't die anytime soon.
Or pay us over time... I'd pay a couple of dollars a month to ensure that my carefully constructed digital persona is taken care of as per my wishes forever. As people get more and more serious about their digital selves, the more and more they're going to be unsatisfied with the idea of their blog just dying on the vine with them and eventually getting eaten alive by comment spam.
We could even maintain a memorial for you on Second Life... if you so desire.
Creepy? Maybe? Morbid? Perhaps...but I guarantee you this becomes a service one day.